Texas reaches 50,000 COVID deaths, Travis County death rate was less than half
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas has now reached more than 50,000 deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the number continues to climb on a daily basis. But it took longer for Texas to reach the 50,000 COVID deaths because of some smart thinking from health authorities.
You'll remember last year the virus was attacking our oldest and most vulnerable Texans the hardest. The early COVID hotspots were nursing homes and hospital ICUs filled with elderly patients. So as soon as vaccines became available in December the oldest Texans got the shots first and the mortality rate started to slow down almost immediately.
But dying from coronavirus is still a thing. Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center puts the latest Texas COVID death count at 50,164. COVID has claimed 1,922 lives in just the past month, but that's just a fraction of the 9,008 lives it took at it's peak back in January.
As you might expect a lot of the deaths happened in big cities where people live closer together. We did some number crunching to figure out the number of deaths for the population.
Overall, Texas' 50,000 deaths came out to 170 deaths per 100,000 people or 170/100K. San Antonio's Bexar County actually had the highest death rate for large Texas metros at 173/100K. It was followed by Dallas and Tarrant Counties combined and then Houston's Harris County. But Travis County came in with just 77.4/100K, less than half the statewide rate.
Here in the Austin metro the three largest counties all fared better than the state COVID death rate, the surprise being Hays County having the highest local death rate at 89.6/100K population, then Williamson County with 78/100K. Travis County, despite a much denser population, was able to fend off the virus a bit better resulting in the 77.4 deaths per 100,000 people we mentioned earlier.
It looks like those strict COVID rules many complained about throughout the pandemic did save a lot of lives. Health officials will tell you we need to keep it up until more people are vaccinated.
