Coronavirus cases are surging in Texas and hospital admissions are significantly increasing.
“It’s pretty dire,” Dr. Peter Hotez, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“We’ve got an enormous amount of community transmission. If you look at the curve of the numbers going up, it’s following what we call an exponential curve which is it looks initially flat, and then it accelerates very sharply, almost vertically. And that’s where we’re at right now,” Hotez added.
Hotez said that the state is not seeing increased deaths yet — but they will soon.
“Those deaths will start to mount up, I would say, in a couple of weeks,” he said.
Hotez said the projections for Covid-19 cases and deaths in Texas suggest as many as 4,000 cases a day by the Fourth of July weekend just over a week away.
“So, three or four times even this very high acceleration, a very high rate in Houston and similar things are happening now in Dallas, and all the metro areas, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio,” he said. “I can’t stress enough how concerned I am.”
He said the coronavirus infection pattern of racial disparity seems to be at play in the latest surge in Texas cases.
“We’ve seen in Houston and some of the other Texas cities a disproportionate impact on people living in low income neighborhoods where it’s harder to do the social distancing, where there’s higher rates of underlying diabetes and hypertension,” he said. “I’m especially worried at what’s happening to the African American, Hispanic, Latinx populations in Houston. We don’t have the data yet, but I’m guessing they are disproportionately being affected like we saw in New Orleans.”
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