Texas hospitals and funeral homes brace for new wave of coronavirus cases

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The number of coronavirus patients in Texas hospitals has nearly doubled since October, and average infections are at their highest level in nearly three months – leaving health officials to prepare for a possible crash in hospitalizations before holidays.

In El Paso, hospitals are so overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients that in early November, the Defense Department sent medical teams to help, and the county summoned 10 mobile morgues to keep the corpses. Local funeral homes are preparing additional refrigerated storage space, as the number of hospital patients with coronavirus in far west Texas has increased almost tenfold since the start of September.

The new wave of infections contrasts with the summer outbreak, when Gov. Greg Abbott held regular press conferences on the virus and demanded that face covers be worn, which earned him the wrath of the far right. Now state officials appear reluctant to quell the spread of the virus by further curtailing economic activity – and are fighting the El Paso County judge’s attempt to impose a curfew and a stay order on the city. home facing record business.

Health experts say they are faced with a public desire to return to normal life and tired of following precautions such as social distancing and wearing a mask. Unlike in the summer, when fear of the virus might have prompted people to heed warnings from health officials, there is now a complacency to strictly follow safety precautions, experts and officials say.

“In July, everyone wears masks. It was 100%. If someone wasn’t wearing a mask, you could just feel the eyes on them – and you would see people enjoying picking up their shirts and covering their noses with them, ”said Dr Philip Keizer, Galveston County Health Authority. , end of October. interview. Now he falls into categories: some wear masks, others pull them under the nose or chin – and sometimes there’s an open challenge, he said.

The fatigue comes as hospitals in El Paso and parts of West Texas fill up with coronavirus patients, and other areas have seen a steady rise in infections that could portend their own wave of illness. hospitalizations. Cases in central Texas reached their highest level since August, with more than half of them involving adults in their 20s and 30s – and officials said an increase “would lead to hospitalizations and unnecessary deaths ”.

Other parts of the state, from the border town of Laredo to Tarrant County, are also seeing an increase in cases.

In Galveston, Keizer said older age groups were infected – unlike this summer, where cases were largely attributed to people aged 20 and 30 while the elderly were hospitalized.

Young people also need advanced medical care now, such as an 8-year-old who “ended up in hospital and on oxygen,” Keizer said.

“People tend to think of this as a linear type event. And that’s not how it works. The cases start to increase exponentially, Keizer said, “where it’s kind of just doubling, doubling, and doubling.”

Texas is approaching one million confirmed cases of the coronavirus, state data shows, and the pandemic has claimed more than 18,700 lives in the state. The number of coronavirus hospital patients statewide is just over half of what it was this summer, when hospitals along the US-Mexico border were overwhelmed and officials argued for an ephemeral medical establishment.

Abbott initially cited a metric called the positivity rate – the part of tests that come back positive – to gauge the severity of the virus and the appropriate safety measures. The state since late October has had a positivity rate above 10%, the threshold according to Abbott was a ‘warning flag’ in May, although the metric is temporarily unreliable due to issues with the underlying data .

More recently, Abbott used the hospitalization rate to identify parts of the state where the virus is spreading or where medical resources might be scarce. Areas where more than 15% of hospital patients routinely have COVID-19 must close bars and restrict customers to restaurants, under Abbott’s order.

Lubbock and El Paso regions have hospitalization rates close to 22% and 40%, respectively.

In El Paso, the University Medical Center reached a record number of coronavirus patients in hospital, with more than 220 on November 2 – a tremendous improvement from just over a month earlier, when they were 30, spokesman Ryan Mielke said. Several floors have been converted to house coronavirus patients and they have rented space at a children’s hospital to treat adults not infected with COVID-19. Emergency medical tents have grown in the hospital parking lot, and the state has sent medical personnel to open a temporary hospital in the El Paso Convention Center, which normally hosts events like Comic-Con.

Doctors said they believe they see continued growth in the number of patients depending on the rate of infection, Mielke said.

“We had a ramp-up plan that was actually drafted last spring, so we looked forward to those days… However, we didn’t expect those numbers until later this season,” Mielke said. “We expect it to be a very long winter”, especially with a possible convergence with the flu.

This is similar to Covenant Medical Center in Lubbock, where Chief Medical Officer Dr Brian Schroeder said they were on an upward trajectory with no evidence of a “peak” so far. The number of patients with COVID-19 has increased in recent weeks, prompting the hospital to dedicate more and more floors to treating people with the virus.

About 40% of hospital patients had the coronavirus as of November 5, compared to an average of 20% in the surrounding area. Hours from another metropolitan center, Lubbock is often a medical destination for those in need of advanced or specialist care, and Covenant – one of two hospital systems there – frequently accepts patients from small rural hospitals this far away. than New Mexico and Kansas.

The hospital has at times been too full to accept transferred patients, and as soon as the space opens, they receive more requests for other upcoming patients, Schroeder said.

The state has sent medical personnel to augment strained or shortage facilities in Lubbock and nearby Amarillo, where the situation at the hospital is similar.

Dr Sheryl Williams, a hospitalist at BSA Health System in Amarillo, said they had many more patients than in an initial wave and the demographics of patients had changed.

In March, there were cases among people who had traveled abroad or to domestic hot spots. Then there was a spike in infections linked to meat packing plants. Now it’s “community spread,” Williams said.

“We see mom and dad and two children walking into the [emergency department] saying, ‘I think we all have it,’ ”she said.

They have expanded the space they use to treat coronavirus patients from one section of an intensive care unit to the whole unit and parts of others, and are doubling the number of patients COVID-19 in some rooms.

“We just hope that we don’t have to develop further,” said Williams.

Emergency physician Dr Robert Hancock said when he was working at a Texoma area hospital at the end of October the entire emergency department was full of patients waiting for a bed in an intensive care unit. The facility was almost out of fans and began to turn to reserves.

“It’s starting to get like this everywhere now,” said Hancock, who practices in Dallas-Fort Worth, Oklahoma and Amarillo, and is president of the Texas College of Emergency Physicians.

“It’s bad, I think we all agree at this point. We were all a little surprised by the epidemic of the summer, but it is the one that worries us all, ”he said. “And we are seeing this progression that many of us were afraid of.”

Elsewhere, the last responders – funeral directors who take the dead to a final resting place – are seeing an increase or are girding more dead. In Houston, some were warned last month that the infections could spread from west Texas to the metro area and that they should start preparing for a possible increase in the number of deaths.

Funeral homes in West Texas and eastern New Mexico have seen a marked increase in virus deaths – to the point that about half are now linked to the coronavirus, said Bill Vallie, regional director of 17 funeral homes there. Around ten employees were infected outside of work, temporarily shutting down two sites because staff were in quarantine.

“It’s like when the storm is in the Gulf, you don’t know if it’s going to come towards Galveston or if it’s going to rise towards Louisiana,” said Greg Compeon, chairman of the Texas Funeral Service Commission. Although the volume of deaths is not yet close to the wave of deaths this summer, he said, the Houston area is seeing an increase and funeral services are being slowed down because loved ones are in quarantine or sick, did he declare.

“We are all holding our breath to see what happens,” he said.

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