Another 10 Rio Grande Valley residents died due to COVID-related complications, county officials reported this week, bringing Hidalgo County near 4,000 total COVID deaths.
Hidalgo County reported six more residents died due to COVID-19, raising their total number of COVID-related deaths to 3,993. Of the six deceased individuals, five of them were vaccinated.
In Cameron County, meanwhile, four more residents died due to COVID of whom one was fully vaccinated. This brings their total number of COVID-related deaths to 2,297.
Together, the two counties also reported more than 1,700 new cases this week.
In Hidalgo County, there were 1,219 new cases including 601 confirmed cases and 618 probable cases. There have now been a total of 146,194 confirmed, 82,310 probable, and 3,159 suspected cases recorded since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In schools, there were 105 new cases among staff and 464 new cases among students this week.
Cameron County health officials reported 542 new cases this week including 236 confirmed cases, 296 probable, and 10 self-reported cases.
From the available data on hospitalizations, the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 saw a small dip this week with 73 people hospitalized with COVID in Hidalgo County at the beginning of the week. Those 73 patients included 51 adults and 22 pediatric patients.
By the end of the week, that slightly dropped to 70 patients including 52 adults and 18 pediatric patients.
Last week, COVID-19 hospitalizations throughout the entire Valley were trending down but continued to see small spikes.
On Sept. 5, there were a total of 133 people hospitalized with COVID in the Valley. By Sept. 11, that number was down to 104, though it had dipped even lower to 92 patients two days prior, according to data from the Texas Department of State Health Services.
While cases and hospitalizations remain relatively high, with Hidalgo and Starr counties still designated to have high COVID-19 Community Levels by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk of death from COVID has dropped under the Omicron variant.
“During the period of Omicron variant predominance, the crude mortality risk among patients hospitalized primarily for COVID-19 decreased to 4.9% during April-June 2022,” stated a report published by the CDC on Thursday, “which is lower than any previous time in the pandemic and approximately one third of what it was during the period of Delta variant predominance.”
The report added that deaths in hospitals decreased overall during the Omicron period and that a larger proportion of hospitalizations and deaths occurred among people most at risk for severe disease such as those more than 65 years old, those with a disability, or those with three or more underlying medical conditions.
The likely causes for the lower death rate were higher levels of vaccination and infection-induced immunity, advances in early treatment for COVID, and lower pathogenicity, or the ability to produce the disease, of the Omicron subvariants.
