SAN ANTONIO – Bexar County is once again seeing more COVID-19 hospitalizations as the number of patients at area hospitals reaches nearly 900 — a 344% increase since Christmas Day.
Tuesday’s COVID-19 Numbers
Metro Health’s COVID-19 dashboard is reporting a 31% positivity rate, a 3.7% increase from the 27.3% reported last week.
The COVID-19 dashboard showed an increase of 4,238 new cases on Tuesday, with a 7-day moving average of 3,645.
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There were no new deaths reported Tuesday, according to the data. Seventeen deaths have been reported over the past seven days.
There are 898 COVID patients in local hospitals with 195 in ICU and 73 on ventilators. Metro Health’s dashboard shows there are 10% of staffed beds available and 66% of ventilators available.
See more of today’s COVID-19 statistics and city resources for the public here.
“We’re really busy. We’re seeing a lot of patients with COVID,” said Dr. Robert Frolichstein, an emergency room doctor with Methodist HospitaI, during Tuesday’s KSAT Q&A on the 6 p.m. News. “I will say, thankfully, they seem to be less ill than the prior surges, the different variants. But there’s still plenty that are ill enough to be admitted to the hospital. I think our hospitalization numbers are rising pretty rapidly. Hopefully, we’ll never get to as many as we had during the prior surges, but we certainly could be headed that way.”
KSAT Q&A: Emergency medical specialist discusses hospitalizations amid omicron surge
Frolichstein said Methodist is working around staffing shortages amid the increase in hospitalizations.
“We stretch and we extend our shifts to cover for our colleagues that are unable to work. The nursing staff has been incredible at picking up extra shifts and working to make things -- make things work while our staff are at home, ill or in quarantine,” he said.
Watch the full KSAT Q&A with Dr. Frolichstein in the embedded player above or click here if you are unable to view it.
City health officials offer the following testing guidelines
- Consider using a self-test before joining indoor gatherings with others who are not in your household.
- A positive self-test result means that you have an infection and should avoid indoor gatherings to reduce the risk of spreading the disease to someone else.
- A negative self-test result means that you may not have an infection. Repeating the test with at least 24 hours between tests will increase the confidence that you are not infected.
- Ask your health care provider if you need help interpreting your test results.
Click here to access more information about other city no-cost testing sites.
