El Paso, Texas, is turning its convention center into a field hospital and asking residents to stay at home for two weeks after the city recorded a roughly 200 percent increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations in less than a month, officials said Sunday, according to NBC News.
The spread of the coronavirus is rising in much of the United States, including Texas' neighbor New Mexico, where a record 4,252 new cases were reported last week, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
In El Paso, a border city with a population of more than 680,000, the number of hospitalizations recorded in the last three weeks jumped from 259 to 786, according to the city's director of public health, Angela Mora.
In a statement, Mora warned that local health services and hospitals will remain strained for people suffering non-coronavirus emergencies like heart attacks, strokes and car accidents.
