Looking Back at El Paso and the COVID-19 Pandemic One Year Ago

Think back just one year. Where were we at with the pandemic in El Paso. Even though it was only a year ago, it's probably tough to remember exactly where we were. We hadn't quite made national news yet, but the numbers were certainly going up. Here are the numbers from just one year ago.

• 3,999 positive cases
• 2,914 recovered cases
• 972 active cases
• 115 COVID-19 related deaths

At this point, it had been a steady incline of cases since the pandemic first hit the Borderland in March. Another pretty telling stat from just one year ago was that we had 482 ventilators in El Paso, with just 24 COVID-19 patients on ventilators. This would obviously change over the coming up months as ventilators would become rare. Something else that would become rare was ICU beds. There were 234 staffed ICU beds in El Paso, with just 52 patients in ICU. This would drastically change over the next few months.

It was just late October into November of last year that things got really bad. We had mobile morgues shipped in because the death toll was so high and we had to implement another 2 week shutdown because the spike in El Paso was so high. Here's a quote from a CNN article from October 30th, 2020.

Samaniego made the decision based on the advice of medical professionals and hospital administrators, he said. As of Thursday evening, according to Samaniego, the hospitalization rate was 44%, a 365.2% increase from the beginning of the month.

This was the time we were getting over 1,000 new cases every day and the daily deaths were reaching double digits as well.