If you want to understand what's going on with #COVID19 right now, the best place to look is Florida, because they do the best job of anyone in terms of data transparency. Note the different age distributions of cases, hospitalizations, & deaths in their regular report.

The full report is here: https://floridadisaster.org/globalassets/covid19/dailies/state_reports_20200625.pdf. The point is that not all hospitalizations are the same. If you're 85 and you've been hospitalized with #COVID19, the risk of death is 61%. If you're 35-44, the risk is 5%. If you're 25-34, 2%.

So, when you see reports about rising numbers of hospitalizations, it's critical to ask: what's the age distribution of the people being hospitalized? We talking about elderly or young people? Without that information, "hospitalizations" statistics are far less useful.

For those who like to see this data visualized, here's a chart of the mortality rate of hospitalized #COVID19 patients by age bracket (in honor of UF grad @GreggGirvan the bars are in retro Gator blue). Not all COVID hospitalizations are created equal.

Here's a similar chart, but this time of the death rate for #COVID19 *cases* in FL. Age trend is even more pronounced, b/c the death rate for COVID *cases* for people under 55 is well below 1%. So when people talk about rising cases, 1st q to ask is: what's the age distribution?

Finally, here's the age distribution of the *hospitalization* rate of Florida #COVID19 cases. Here again, you see that the frequency of hospitalization is much higher for the elderly.

The reason I'm walking you through all of this is because the recent rise in hospitalizations in Florida is driven by younger people. This appears to be true in Texas as well, though I don't think we have data sources in Texas that break out the distribution as well as Florida's.