The holidays brought a huge demand for COVID tests, health officials said. But demand hasn’t led to delays at the University of Texas Medical Branch campuses, which have built up testing capacity during the most recent wave, said Dr. Janak Patel, the director of Infection Control and Healthcare Epidemiology at the medical branch. Hospitalizations and deaths haven’t increased significantly, he said. “Do not expect the illness to be mild,” Patel said. “You still can get prolonged high fevers. You still can get headaches and joint aches and fatigue that can last for several days. The outpatient illness is still pretty significant.”

The increase in cases is being felt across the county, including at its largest medical provider, the University of Texas Medical Branch, where hundreds of employees are out sick because of positive COVID-19 tests. About 300 of the medical branch’s 11,000 employees were quarantined as of Friday because they had tested positive for COVID-19, said Dr. Gulshan Sharma, chief medical officer. About half were front-line medical workers, and the number of quarantined is near that during the height of the delta variant surge, Sharma said.

While patient volume has remained steady during the pandemic, clinics are limited based on the number of providers and their caps on caseloads, UTMB officials said. UTMB Health Psychiatry Webster saw about 9,900 patients from September 2019 to August 2020; that number increased nearly 20% to about 11,800 patients seen from September 2020 to August 2021, according to UTMB data. while the introduction of telehealth has opened doors in terms of access, the demand is greatly outpacing the number of providers available for counseling, said Jeff Temple, a professor and licensed psychologist at UTMB. “There’s only so many hours and only so many people that an individual [provider] can see,” Temple said. “The increased access has helped, but the demand is so great that it still is leaving people lacking.

Dr. Prashant Rai, assistant professor, and associate director in the Neurology residency program at the University of Texas Medical Branch, wrote about researching brain fog in COVID-19 patients. “Our study showed the presence of brain fog/acute confusional state at admission or during hospitalization was associated with poorer outcomes overall, with these higher mortalities and increased need for intensive care support,” Rai wrote.

America’s Essential Hospitals has recognized the University of Texas Medical Branch for its work to craft and continuously maintain a compendium of expert interpretive commentary regarding SARS-CoV-2 testing and a novel supporting technology that applies these comments and delivers them to physicians and patients.