COVID in Austin Update (June 27)

I didn’t scour the web for news today, so will be pretty brief today.

State of Texas

On the statewide news front, Governor Abbott has waived additional alcohol regulations to allow some bars and restaurants to sell mixed drinks for to-go or delivery orders.

Some rules were waived awhile ago that basically allowed restaurants to sell sealed spirits (e.g. the small bottles of liquor) along with mixers, beer, and wine. This expands it to allowed businesses to mix and “seal” the drinks for off-site consumption. There are a few rules involved, such as the bar selling must also have permanent food service and must serve the alcohol with food. The notice does clearly state that there is no ratio of food to alcohol required.

On the statewide data front, new cases were still high—but not a record—5,747. Thursday’s record stands with this coming in second.

Hospitalizations set another record today with 5,523.

Positivity rate jumped up, which isn’t good, so now we’re at 13.23% for the last 7 days.

Travis County (Austin)

Mayor Adler announced that Austin Public Health will not be testing asymptomatic folks anymore—just too much demand for testing. Another bad sign that we don’t have the testing capacity to really stay on top of understanding this virus.

With the data today, there was no report yesterday, so this is since Thursday at 6 p.m.

Since Thursday, we had 728 new cases. For daily counts, I’m considering this 728/2, or 364 for each of the last two days. Technically, this is the single highest new count we have, but being over two days is cheating a bit. 364 a day would make both days third (we had a 506 and 418 last week).

We’ve had 117 total deaths (up from 116) and we currently have 316 hospitalizations, a new record from Thursday’s record at 293. 114 are in the ICU and 47 are on vents.

We had 46 new hospitalizations today (after yesterday’s 59), which has moved our 7-day average to 48.9 a day.

None of this is good. Stay safe, Austin.