El Paso County, Texas, has instituted a curfew as the city deals with record levels of new COVID-19 infections.
Ricardo Samaniego, a judge from the county, issued the two-week nightly curfew, which began Sunday night and will run every night from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. The county recorded 1,443 new infections on Monday morning, breaking the previous record set on Saturday, according to the El Paso Times.
Samaniego said during a news conference that El Paso County, where the border city of El Paso is located, has experienced a 160% surge in the positivity rate since Oct. 1 and a 300% increase in hospitalizations.
Hospitals are having trouble dealing with the rising number of new cases, and a local children’s hospital has begun to take in non-coronavirus-infected patients from University Medical Center of El Paso, according to CNN.
“We are overwhelmed with patients at this point,” said UMC spokesman Ryan Mielke. “However, we have a strong partnership with El Paso Children’s Hospital.”
Samaniego also took into account the overcrowding at hospitals when he made his decision to begin the curfew.
“Currently, our hospitals are stretched to capacity,” he said.
“The curfew is enough to limit the economic consequences on local businesses by allowing the stores to stay open. We carefully thought about the economic impact if we were to impose a full stay-at-home order like we did at the beginning of this process,” Samaniego said, adding that those who violate the curfew order could face a $500 fine.
According to the El Paso Times, there are nearly 12,500 active cases of COVID-19 in El Paso County out of the total of 40,887 positive cases that have been recorded since the pandemic first began. Health data shows that at least 576 people have died from COVID-19.
In Texas, there have been about 911,600 cases of COVID-19 and more than 18,000 deaths associated with the disease, according to a tally by the New York Times. The state as a whole has seen a 37% increase in new cases over the past two weeks but a 13% drop in fatalities.
