Nearly as fast as the numbers rose over the summer, Austin and Travis County have begun to see a very steady week-over-week decline in COVID cases and hospitalizations.
On September 28, 2021, Health Authority Dr. Desmar Walkes made the officially recommendation to move the area down to Stage 4 on the risk chart, and just a few short days later the numbers had fallen down into Stage 3 territory. However, the addition this year of the Delta variant has been a bit of a game-changer, Walkes said, which has left Austin Public Health very hesitant to recommend any further decline into Stage 3 officially.
“We are looking at the modeling, we are looking at the science, and we are going to be assessing what, if any, changes need to be made,” said Walkes.
Recommendations could be made fairly soon for a stage decline, but no timeline is known at this point.
The Austin area is currently experiencing the lowest 7-day average of new daily hospital admissions since mid-July.
