Not Really A COVID in Austin Update (July 21)

This isn’t really my normal update. Someone in the family is under the weather and the doctor’s appointment turned into a long ER visit. Everything is fine now and nothing COVID related, but it’s past 10 pm and I haven’t had dinner. Forgive me!

Quickly, though, in passing, UIL announced guidelines for fall sports in Texas public schools. For the larger 5A and 6A schools, fall sports are delayed until later in September. Smaller schools can start on time (beginning of August for practices).

Eastside High is the only 4A school that I can think of off the top of my head in AISD that could start in August, but the County Health Order already will force them to wait until after Labor Day anyhow since it suspends extracurricular activities too.

All schools, though, must wait for marching band. No band camp this year.

Meanwhile, California announced fall sports will start in 2021.

In terms of numbers, Texas hospitalizations hit a new record high and our deaths were high again. I’ll recap everything in full for tomorrow’s post.

Within Austin, we had 600 and someodd cases. Hospitalizations and hospitalization admits were still lower than we had been seeing. Deaths, though, we saw 9 of them reported today. That’s a single-day high.

As deaths are the metric with the longest lead time, it makes sense we’re going to see increasing and higher deaths for some time until the flattening/decrease catches up.

Anyhow, back tomorrow in normal fighting shape.