“We want the people of North Texas to please not panic regarding the COVID-19 virus. The virus has created increased hospitalizations over the past two weeks, but we have capacity in North Texas in our hospitals.

The 19-county area (to include Dallas, Tarrant, Denton and Collin counties) covered by ‘Trauma Service E’ has a little over a 1,000 COVID-19 patients with roughly 35% of those patients being in ICU beds. We have approximately 38 percent of our ventilators in use so, we have 62 percent available if needed. The COVID-19 patients hospitalized represent less than 10 percent of our hospitalized patients. While we acknowledge the COVID-19 hospitalizations have increased recently, we currently have over 5,200 available beds within our North Texas trauma service area, running approximately 69% hospital occupancy rate.

We all need to work together to slow the COVID-19 virus spread and at the same time keep our economy open. Some individual actions would be to wear facial coverings in public, wash your hands frequently, utilize social distancing and practice good personal hygiene. We are all in this together and if we do our part, we will prevail.”