center in teaneck, new jersey. good to have you on. it s so important for folks to see and hear from people like you because there s a sort of out of sight, out of mind phenomenon with this. kind gf on with your normal life, but you re seeing it. you re seeing this every day. one of the hardest hit hospitals during the height of last year s covid. what is it like today? well, it s very different from it was a year ago when we had our second wave. we had between 70 and 90 patients after the holidays admitted to the hospital with several on ventilators. this year we re seeing a different trend. we re seeing a high community positivity rate, but we re not seeing as many inpatients. today, for example, we started with 31 patients. we re down to 29. one is on a ventilator. and so we re seeing a much different type of illness. we re seeing a less severity so that it s more in the community what we re seeing. that s interesting to hear.
i do speak to quite a few border patrol agents. reactions are mixed. overwhelmingly i would say at the just want some sort of consistency. they really want some sort of policy that is going to let people in that should be in but also to get a little bit of relief for them. they are understandably overwhelmed and seeing numbers they haven t seen in a long time. bill: the mayor of mcallen, texas says the covid positive rate there is between 35 and 40%. if you are testing everyone in brownsville, what is your positive rate there? thankfully we aren t doing as bad as mcallen. if you look at our migrant rate covid positivity slightly under 10% overall. over the last month or so it s closer to 15. the city of brownsville itself our numbers aren t as bad as mcallen certainly. but i really couldn t venture a guess of our community