BY NAXIELY LOPEZ-PUENTE AND BERENICE GARCIA | STAFF WRITERS
So many people are dying in Hidalgo County of COVID-19, that the county is once again asking the state for permission to use a refrigerated truck to hold bodies — all as hospital space begins to run out.
August has been the deadliest month this year, and this week the numbers were particularly high. More people died this week from COVID-19 than in all of July.
The county reported 64 deaths this week. That’s two less than the number of people who died from the virus throughout the entire months of June and July, when a total of 66 deaths were reported.
In June, the county reported 32 deaths. In July, the county reported 34 deaths. With four days left in August, the county has already reported 149 deaths.
Ricardo Saldaña, Hidalgo County Emergency Management Coordinator, said he asked the Texas Division of Emergency Management to reactivate a refrigerated truck that can hold anywhere between 20 to 30 bodies earlier this week following warnings from local funeral homes and crematories.
“They’re starting to see an increase in fatalities regarding COVID and they wanted to make sure we had them early on and not wait until we had a situation like last year, where we had to request them and we had to wait,” Saldaña said Friday. “This time we wanted to get them here early on — at least one trailer — to help us support the issue should we get overwhelmed.”
He expects the state to grant the request sometime next week.
Hospitalizations also shot up 40% from one day to another in Hidalgo County, according to figures county health officials there released Friday.
Meanwhile, the state reported Friday there were only eight ICU beds available throughout the entire RGV Trauma Service Area, which includes hospitals in Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr and Willacy counties. The last time local hospitals were this short on ICU beds was more than a year ago on July 13, 2020.
The state data indicated there were 655 COVID-19 hospitalizations throughout the Valley on Thursday. But on Friday, Hidalgo County alone reported an additional 192 patients were being treated there, for a total of 675 hospitalizations in that one county alone.
One third of them, or 228, are being treated in intensive care units and seven of them were children.
Children, who returned to in-person tuition earlier this month, continue to lead new COVID-19 infections.
Of the 481 new cases Hidalgo County reported Friday, 111 were children under the age of 12 who cannot be vaccinated. They made up 23% of the new infections reported Friday.
Children 18 and under accounted for nearly 40% of all new infections.
At least 75 of those cases were tied to schools, with 53 students and 22 staff members testing positive, according to Friday’s figures.
In the past nine days, more than 500 new cases have been linked to schools. Hidalgo County reported 518 cases have been tied to in-person tuition since it began tracking those figures Aug. 18.
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