COVID-19 hospitalizations stall out just above Stage 4 threshold
Though it appeared the 7-day moving average of COVID-19 hospital admissions were dropping rapidly enough in Austin to get us to the threshold for Stage 4 COVID-19 risk-based guidelines by the end of this week, the numbers have stalled just north, keeping us in the Stage 5 threshold for now.
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Though it appeared the 7-day moving average of COVID-19 hospital admissions were dropping rapidly enough in Austin to get us to the threshold for Stage 4 COVID-19 risk-based guidelines by the end of this week, the numbers have stalled just above it, keeping us in the Stage 5 threshold for now.
Austin-Travis County leaders use several metrics in their key indicators for staging dashboard, including community transmission rate, positivity rate and the 7-day moving average of hospital admissions.
Those numbers have plummeted since the later part of January when the 7-day moving average of hospital admissions was at more than twice what it is now. On Jan. 19, the 7-day moving average of admissions was 128.9. As of Tuesday, it's at 53. The threshold for Stage 4, using hospital admission data alone, is 50.
Last Tuesday, Austin-Travis County health authority Dr. Desmar Walkes told local leaders the area would likely hit Stage 4 guidelines "in the next 10 days or so." That timeline doesn't appear to be playing out in real time, but projections from the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium show hospitalizations admission numbers are headed for lower stages of risk over the next few months.
"I think the main uncertainty is how quickly things decline," said Dr. Spencer Fox, the associate director of the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium.
That progress towards lower stages of risk could be slowed by the new BA.2 subvariant of omicron, according to Fox.
"We are tracking closely the variant emergence of the BA.2 variant of omicron, which seems to be spreading more rapidly than the current variant, and is kind of gaining steam in the United States," Fox said. "We don't expect that to actually cause a new surge. We think it's just most likely to slow down the current decline."
During a briefing last week, Walkes said they will take their time in making the decision to shuffle to less restrictive guidelines and reminded city and county leaders that other factors outside of hospitalizations such as community transmission rate and positivity rate — both of which are still high — also guide that move.
"We are monitoring the aforementioned 7-day moving average stall in the low 50s," a spokesperson for APH said. "While we are moving in the right direction, we're still in Stage 5 and should act accordingly."