Dr. Alex Garza, incident commander for the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, will be holding briefings on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 3:30 p.m. — instead of every day as he has since April 5. They can be watched on the task force’s Facebook page.
However, the task force will still report the hospitalization numbers every day for the metropolitan area’s largest healthcare systems: BJC HealthCare, Mercy, SSM Health and St. Luke’s Hospital.
On Tuesday, May 5, there were 673 patients in the task force’s hospitals and who had either tested positive for COVID-19 or were awaiting test results.
That’s up from 653 yesterday. The number of patients in the intensive care units is 158, and the number of people on ventilators is 117.
During his daily briefings, Garza talks about the seven-day moving average of the total number of COVID-19 patients in the hospitals — which he says is a good indicator of transmission in the region. It was 669 on May 5. This is the lowest this figure has been since April 17, according to the task force’s Tuesday report.
Another important data point is the seven-day “moving average” of new hospital admissions. On April 9, that seven-day average stood at 59, and that number is now down to 42 on May 5.
“The new hospital admission data is more timely than the hospitalization data because it shows the new admits coming in everyday,” Garza said on May 4, during his Monday briefing when he spoke about the admission data for the time.
Across the system hospitals, 41 COVID-19 patients were discharged yesterday, bringing the cumulative number of patients discharged to 1,463.
