Texas recorded its highest positivity rate of new COVID-19 cases in the course of the pandemic on Wednesday — and it's probably an undercount.
In Kerr County, Peterson Health said 39 people tested positive. In three days, Peterson said 105 people tested positive for COVID-19. On Wednesday, 82% of those cases were unvaccinated. It's one of the most significant three-day Kerr County totals since the start of the pandemic in March of 2020.
Peterson Regional Medical Center had 10 people admitted with COVID-19, three in the intensive care unit. Across Texas, hospitalizations hit 4,917 — the second consecutive day of a 10% increase.
However, the rise in positivity has been a daily occurrence since Christmas Eve. On Wednesday, that number hit another record — 24%. The caveat is that Texas is testing less, and results are increasingly not reported due to at-home testing (which is also hard to come by).
The 39 cases are one of the biggest Kerr County weekday surges during the pandemic.
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BUT IS THERE GOOD NEWS?
With 10 hospitalizations, Peterson Regional Medical Center remains in good position to care for the sickest COVID-19 patients. Remember, the highest number of admissions was 48.
WHAT'S HAPPENING ELSEWHERE
- The NBA postponed tonight's game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Miami Heat. The Spurs don't have enough players to form the minimum roster — thank COVID-19.
- Texas Gov. Greg Abbott spent part of his day touting Texas economic achievements rather than addressing the skyrocketing infection rate. More than 80,000 Texans have died from COVID-19.
- Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine announced Tuesday that CORBEVAX™, a protein sub-unit COVID-19 Vaccine, whose technology was created and engineered at its Center for Vaccine Development (CVD), has received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) to launch in India with other underserved countries to follow.
- "Protein-based vaccines have been widely used to prevent many other diseases, have proven safety records, and use economies of scale to achieve low-cost scalability across the world," said Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, professor and associate dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and Co-Director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. "Our decade-long studies advancing coronavirus vaccine prototypes has led to the creation of this vaccine, which will fill the access gap created by the more expensive, newer vaccine technologies and that today are still not able to be quickly scaled for global production."
