Greatly appreciate your insider perspective. Thank you, brother.
You're welcome... And I don't mean to be dramatic about it. It really is hard to say right now anything more than we are most certainly seeing the biggest surge-let since the start.
Real numbers.
Last week we were at ~63% capacity. The big facilities in our system (Dallas, FW, Arlington) are now at around 87% of capacity for negative flow rooms. The smaller community hospitals do not see those kinds of percentages. And much of this capacity is stuff we built and brought online in anticipation of the surge that really never came. And today was (I am pretty sure) the biggest day for positive tests so far.
WORST case is this is the wake of Memorial Day weekend. If that is so we have the combination of the protests, "reopening" and just laxer public habits to look forward to. I do the shopping for my domicile, and the last week or two people seem to be becoming much more lax about contact/masking etc. It would be bad, but not as bad if this is the front end of the protest surge. And best case is it is just a small random bump.
The weird thing about COVID is it does not affect most people overly much, and yet a certain percentage of folks are going to have their lungs damaged. And we are forgetting how contagious it is because it is so harmless for the majority.
That said... there are those who think the whole thing is just a big psy-op. I am not so sure.
But I sure do hope these rising numbers are just a little anomaly, and not the front end of something bigger...