Via The New York Times: ‘Feeling Like Death’: Inside a Houston Hospital Bracing for a Virus Peak. Excerpt:
HOUSTON — Melissa Estrada had tried to be so careful about the coronavirus. For months she kept her three children at home, and she always wore a mask at the grocery store. She and her daughter even stitched face coverings for relatives and friends.
But over the weekend Ms. Estrada, 37, was fighting the virus at Houston Methodist Hospital after a week of treatments that included an experimental drug, steroids, intensive care and high doses of oxygen. She probably contracted the virus while attending a dinner with relatives who had also been cautious, she said. Within days, all four adults and several children who had been at the gathering tested positive for the coronavirus.
“It was really, really scary,” Ms. Estrada said of her illness. She worried constantly about leaving her children motherless. “You hear about it and you think it’s the older people or the people with underlying issues,” she said. “And I’m healthy. I don’t understand how I got this bad.”
Coronavirus cases are rising quickly in Houston, as they are in other hot spots across the South and the West. Harris County, which includes most of Houston and is one of the largest counties in the nation, has been averaging more than 1,100 new cases each day, among the most of any American county. Just two weeks ago, Harris County was averaging about 313 new cases daily.
Measures to cope with the surge and to plan for its peak were evident over the weekend at Methodist, which called nurses to work extra shifts, brought new laboratory instruments on line to test thousands more samples a day and placed extra hospital beds in an empty unit about to be reopened as patients filled new coronavirus wards.
Gov. Greg Abbott, speaking in Dallas on Sunday, said that the virus had taken a “very swift and a very dangerous turn” in Texas, and that the increase in the rate of positive coronavirus tests, to over 13 percent in the past month from less than 4 percent, was an “alarm bell.” He made the grim assessment after meeting with Vice President Mike Pence and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the coordinator of the White House’s coronavirus task force, who joined the governor in urging all Texans to wear masks and avoid close contact in crowds.
Mr. Pence, appearing at a Dallas rally celebrating religious freedoms, threw his support behind Mr. Abbott and his efforts to reopen the state’s economy — even as the governor made an about-face on Friday in his phased plan by ordering bars closed and capacity at restaurants cut. Many young people had socialized in them, standing close together, not wearing masks, some expressing skepticism that they could become infected.
During the virus’s first peak in April, the majority of patients testing positive in the Methodist hospital system were older than 50. Now the majority are, like Ms. Estrada, relatively young. Nearly one-third of intensive care patients are now under 50, much higher than in the initial coronavirus surge.
The stress on medical institutions burst into public view last week, when Texas Medical Center — a downtown cluster of Houston’s major public and private hospitals, including Methodist — announced that the baseline intensive care unit capacity across its hospitals was full, with 28 percent of beds occupied by virus patients. That was nearly twice a threshold established by the state, which called for I.C.U.s to have a maximum 15 percent of virus patients for hospitals to resume elective services.
