AUSTIN, Texas — As the week comes to a close, we want to take a good look at how the pandemic is worsening in our area.
For the Austin metro, the past week has seen an average of more than 350 cases per day (368).
Last Friday, that number was 270. And a month ago, Oct. 20, we were only seeing 136 cases a day. We're also doing more testing now than at any point previously in the pandemic.
How are those cases impacting our hospitals?
For the state health region that includes Austin, there were 239 COVID-19 patients in the hospital as of Thursday. A week ago there were 164, and last month 107.
Coronavirus data Nov. 20
Our ICUs are following a similar trend with 68 coronavirus patients Thursday, compared to 60 a week ago and 43 a month ago.
So the numbers are going in the wrong direction lately but, by comparison, not nearly as bad as the peak of the outbreak locally back in July.
Then, we reached more than 750 cases per day, nearly 600 COVID-19 patients in our hospitals and almost 200 in our ICUs.