Via nbcnews.com: Internal messages reveal crisis at Houston hospitals as coronavirus cases surge. Excerpt and then a comment:
HOUSTON — At Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital on Sunday, the medical staff ran out of both space for new coronavirus patients and a key drug needed to treat them. With no open beds at the public hospital, a dozen COVID-19 patients who were in need of intensive care were stuck in the emergency room, awaiting transfers to other Houston area hospitals, according to a note sent to the staff and shared with reporters.
A day later, the top physician executive at the Houston Methodist hospital system wrote to staff members warning that its coronavirus caseload was surging: “It has become necessary to consider delaying more surgical services to create further capacity for COVID-19 patients,” Dr. Robert Phillips said in the note, an abrupt turn from three days earlier, when the hospital system sent a note to thousands of patients, inviting them to keep their surgical appointments.
And at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, staff members were alerted recently that the hospital would soon begin taking in cancer patients with COVID-19 from the city’s overburdened public hospital system, a highly unusual move for the specialty hospital.
These internal messages highlight the growing strain that the coronavirus crisis is putting on hospital systems in the Houston region, where the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has nearly quadrupled since Memorial Day. As of Tuesday, more than 3,000 people were hospitalized for the coronavirus in the region, including nearly 800 in intensive care.
“To tell you the truth, what worries me is not this week, where we’re still kind of handling it,” said Roberta Schwartz, Houston Methodist’s chief innovation officer, who’s been helping lead the system’s efforts to expand beds for COVID-19 patents. “I’m really worried about next week.”
What’s happening in Houston draws eerie parallels to New York City in late March, when every day brought steep increases in the number of patients seeking care at overburdened hospitals — though, so far, with far fewer deaths. But as coronavirus cases surge in Texas, state officials here have not reimplemented the same lockdown measures that experts say helped bring New York’s outbreak under control, raising concern among public health officials that Houston won’t be able to flatten the curve.
“The time to act and time to be alarmed is not when you’ve hit capacity, but it’s much earlier when you start to see hospitalizations increase at a very fast rate,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of integrative biology who leads the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. “It is definitely time to take some kind of action. It is time to be alarmed.”
Even as new cases and hospitalizations soar, the number of daily deaths in Texas has remained relatively low. On Tuesday, the state reported nearly 7,000 new cases, a record, but only 21 new deaths. All told, New York state has reported nearly 25,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19. Texas has recorded fewer than 2,500, including 378 in Harris County, which includes Houston.
But experts caution that rising hospitalizations today will likely result in a spike in deaths in the coming weeks, and those who require ICU care for COVID-19 but recover often leave the hospital with lasting health problems.
Meyers and others said that while hospitals across the United States generally are more prepared than they were in March and April — personal protective equipment is more plentiful, advances in therapeutics have helped patients and ventilators aren’t in short supply — the lack of government measures to slow the spread in Texas and other states puts them at a disadvantage.
It's striking that a Houston hospital named for Lyndon Johnson should be struggling like this. I had a lot of bones to pick with LBJ when he was president, but if this had happened on his watch, on his home turf, he would have moved with blinding speed—and God help anyone who got in his way.
"Lack of government measures" indeed. LBJ would have dropped government measures on Houston in enormous quantities and from a very great height—and with a hell of a lot more effect than bombing Hanoi ever achieved.
