While local hospital leaders aren’t sounding the alarm about capacity concerns, we heard a similar story from leaders at St. Luke’s and Houston Methodist: hospital beds and emergency rooms are regularly filling up as both health systems continue to manage coronavirus patients on top of all the folks finally heading to the hospital for care they may have delayed due to the pandemic, all while the number of patients coming into local emergency rooms is already hitting pre-COVID levels.
Roberta Schwartz, Executive VP of Houston Methodist Hospital in the Texas Medical Center, told the Press that it wasn’t surprising to hear that the Houston Methodist ER in Sugar Land was recently so busy it had to turn away ambulances temporarily.
“The emergency rooms and the hospitals are very full,” Schwartz said.
When we asked Dr. Brad Lembcke — Chief Medical Officer at St. Luke’s — about the current status of his hospital system’s bed count and ER capacity, he said “We’re full, I guess is probably the two-second version.”
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Lots of Schwartz’s colleagues around the country have told her their hospitals are seeing lower numbers of emergency room visits than they did before COVID. “That is not the case at Houston Methodist,” Schwartz said, “and seems not to be the case in Houston.”
St. Luke’s is also seeing a similar trend of ERs packed with more patients than in other parts of the United States, Lembcke said. While “a lot of places report only recovering to about 80 percent of what their prior volumes were,” he said, St. Luke’s main downtown hospital is now seeing ER numbers that have “just about reached the pre-COVID states.”
Even though coronavirus hospitalizations have fallen after the winter surge, local hospitals continue to deal with steady numbers of COVID-19 patients. At Houston Methodist, the number of coronavirus hospitalizations has plateaued in recent weeks, and at a level higher than where that patient count leveled-off at after the first two surges in the spring and summer of 2020.
Schwartz said that after the first surge last spring, coronavirus hospitalizations at Houston Methodist fell to around 50. Following the summer surge, they averaged “about 100 COVID patients on a daily basis.”
“When we came down from this latest surge in December and January, we’re settling in at about 180 to 200,” Schwartz said.
“If you had a normal load of patients, and you add on 200, that would put some stressors to the system, and I think that you’re seeing that across Houston. And this comment on saturation is not just us, it’s lots of hospitals,” she said.
Lembcke said that St. Luke’s average number of coronavirus hospitalizations these days is “maybe a little higher” than what they saw right after the summer surge. “But it’s more consistent. It’s been pretty stable over the last month or so.”
When asked about why Houston’s hospitals are still so full, Schwartz said she and her colleagues have a few educated guesses.
“We do know for sure — 100 percent, this is documented in many papers — that people have delayed their care in many cases, and are coming in with later stage illnesses,” many of whom whose conditions got bad enough that they needed emergency care, Schwartz said. Some of those patients “were people who said ‘I don’t want to get COVID from going to the hospital or to the doctor.’ We know that.”
They note also that a lot of nurses have retired or left the industry due to burnout from the previous high volume of COVID cases, and that they are seeing a lot more younger patients with serious COVID issues, as is “needing a lung transplant”-level of seriousness. I certainly hope we’ll get back on a downward trajectory as more people get vaccinated, but this is a reminder both that we really need to get as many people vaxxed as we can, and that even as the overall numbers have dropped we’re still not out of the red yet.
Is the increase in ER visits increasing or have inpatients increased or both? It’s hard to tell.
Indeed the failed policies of our leaders are likely to blame here. Covid numbers have continued to plateau or drop. (Of course most COVID patients really died of something else. Rep Wright had lung cancer, so did John Prine, so did Anne Feeney. Lung cancer is not a joke, man.) There are probably a lot of people coming to the ER after the huge increase in violent crime and car smashes. As well as those who couldn’t or wouldn’t get routine treatment or screening for the past year.
All of the big hospitals go on and on about how bad everything is, but ask your family doctor. You might get kind of a different story there.