AUSTIN (Talk1370.com) -- Local health leaders are sounding the alarm as new COVID-19 hospitalizations reach levels not yet seen in the Austin metro during the pandemic - with intensive care beds continuing to become more and more scarce.
Dr. Mark Escott, interim health authority for Travis County, gave his weekly update to Travis County Commissioners on Tuesday morning.
"The entire state is in surge," Escott said. "The entire state is in a state of emergency. And this indicates that we need to have a substantial change in policy to more aggressively mitigate the risk of spread, because what we’re doing now is not working."
Escott said 84 new hospitalizations were reported across the five county metro area Monday evening. That puts the 7-day moving average of new hospitalizations at 77, another all-time high - a metric that has gone up 140% since early December.
Positivity rates are another point of concern, with Travis County reaching 15.5%. That's up from 9.8% two weeks ago.
"It's not just a Travis County problem," Escott said, highlighting the positivity rates from other counties - Bastrop at 24.3%, Caldwell at 21.9%, Hays at 19.3%, and Williamson County at 20.1%.
752 new COVID-19 cases were reported Monday, pushing the total number of confirmed cases to 52,708 and the total number of active cases to 4,974.
Escott said new projections from the University of Texas' COVID-19 Modeling Consortium show that the Austin area could reach 100+ new daily hospital admissions and exceed the available ICU capacity by January 15, if not sooner.
"The data that we have so far for today indicates that we will likely break a new record today, and I expect that we will make many new records over the coming two weeks in terms of new admissions to the hospital, unfortunately," Escott said.