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Hospitals seeing increase in COVID-19 patients

After experiencing a slight downward trend in the number of COVID patients, hospitals in the Basin have seen those numbers rise significantly in the last few days.

MIDLAND, Texas — In a weekly press conference, Russell Meyers, CEO of Midland Memorial Hospital, said that the hospital had a "significant spike" in COVID patients over the weekend.

COVID patients have jumped from seven to 25 in the last two weeks, but not all of them are from the Midland-Odessa area.

RELATED: Breaking down COVID-19 cases in West Texas, SE New Mexico

Local hospitals are getting quite a few patients from Lubbock. 

University Medical Center in Lubbock said the reason why patients are coming from Lubbock is because UMC is nearly at max capacity. Not all patients are COVID-related. 

MMH has received 10 COVID patients from UMC. That has raised MMH's overall COVID capacity to nearly 15 percent.

As for the increase in COVID cases in general? 

Hospitals are still perplexed, but the spike is cause for concern.

"We had a significant spike this past weekend. As I understand there has been some period through the weekend where hospitals in Lubbock were on diversion status so we’ve gotten more transfers, more patients moved to us than we're accustomed too. Of those 25 patients in the hospital now 10 of them live outside of Midland County," Meyers said.

In Ector County, the hospitals there are experiencing the same situation. More patients coming in from out of the county.

"Only 13 of the 29 are from Ector County, which means 16 of the 29 are either nursing home patients or out-of-county transfers so that’s roughly 55% of our COVID patients that are not from Ector County," Trevor Tankersley, Medical Center Hospital's Director of Public Relations said.

Even with the transfers, Midland Memorial still has 25 COVID patients in house.

"At 25 patients, that is 13.8 percent of our total census. We’re just below the governor's threshold of 15 percent, but just over the past three days we’ve seen quite a significant tick up in our patient volume," Meyers said.

Still, the question remains: why are we seeing a significant jump in COVID cases over the past few days after experiencing a week in which cases seemed to be dropping?

"You know I’m not exactly sure why there would be a big jump. I don’t think we’ve seen any holidays. We're well past Labor Day. It could be a number of things. Now, as far as the numbers, we have been taking a pretty good either flattened off or slight dip over the past few weeks," Tankersley said.

As for how both counties would respond to hospitalizations going over 15 percent capacity in terms of COVID patients, county officials were unavailable for comment.

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