Hospitals

The state's top expert said nearly 99 percent of the population has developed some immune response to COVID-19. But other public health experts caution the virus can be unpredictable.

People who get infected with omicron are less likely to go to the hospital, go on a ventilator or die. But with the current huge volume of patients, hospitals are still struggling to treat them all.

Most of us will eventually get COVID but that's not an invitation to party with omicron. Here's why you might want to hang onto your mask and keep cautious a little longer.

Here's how their hospitals are doing nearly two years into the pandemic, what they are seeing in new omicron patients, and their thoughts on the wave of burnout affecting the industry.

Understaffed hospitals are already coping with increased patient demand heading into the holidays. They have few options to expand if omicron creates a huge new wave of COVID patients.

So far the state has paid to hire more than 8,000 contract health care workers as hospitalizations from COVID-19 in Texas approach the record set last winter.

The infusions are more available and accessible to Texans than ever before, and new criteria for who can receive antibody treatment have led more doctors to prescribe it.

Though cases and hospitalizations appeared to flatten this week, officials say the area is likely to see numbers surge over the next few weeks.

More than 200 kids are now in Texas hospitals. That's higher than previous peaks during the pandemic.

“It’s going to be close,” one health official said as a record number of Texas hospitals run out of intensive care beds and warn that they may soon have more COVID-19 patients than they can handle.