COVID-19 hospitalizations starting to plateau in Dallas area, official says

A Dallas health official said coronavirus hospitalizations in the area may be starting to plateau, adding that he was hopeful the large numbers fueled by the highly contagious delta variant would start to come down in the coming weeks. 

Steve Love, president and CEO of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council, said in an update Tuesday with the Irving-Las Colinas Chamber of Commerce that the 19 counties included in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have consistently had 3,500 patients hospitalized daily with COVID-19, according to The Dallas Morning News. 

Love added that he was “cautiously optimistic” that there had not been any large surges in hospitalizations in the past week. 

“It does appear that the cases may begin to come down in Dallas County, which means hospitalizations will hopefully come down in the short term,” he said, the Morning News reported. “I define short term as probably 10 days to two weeks.”

The council president went on to clarify that while hospitalizations overall appeared to be starting to plateau, this may not be the case for some individual counties, including Tarrant, Collin and Denton. 

Additionally, coronavirus hospitalizations among children do not appear to be leveling off, with Love announcing last week that pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations had reached an all-time high in the area. 

“The pediatric population continues to show some slight increases, and then it’ll bump down, come back up,” he said Tuesday, adding that the positivity rate among children has been as high as 25 to 26 percent in some counties. 

On Tuesday, Dallas County reported 3,357 additional confirmed COVID-19 infections, bringing the total to nearly 317,000 cases, according to the county’s health department. 

An estimated 4,453 people in the county have died due to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. 

Love said Tuesday that about 60 percent of the outside hospital workers promised to Dallas-area hospitals as part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) deployment last month have arrived, with required background screenings slowing the process of getting in enough people to help combat COVID-19. 

Late last month, Abbott announced he would be sending 2,500 additional out-of-state medical personnel to help address the coronavirus surge, bringing the total outside medical workers deployed across the Lone Star State to 8,100. 

Abbott has continued to urge residents to get vaccinated against COVID-19, while also fighting back against local districts that have sought to impose mask mandates in schools, defying the governor’s executive order banning the requirements.