For a variety of reasons, the data is hard to get a handle on.
Be like Hank, except inside
Texas is bracing for a pandemic that is projected to kill tens of thousands of people across the U.S., but health officials and state leaders are struggling to provide the public with timely updates on how many people are infected and how many hospital beds and ventilators are available for the critically ill.
Other states across the country have been providing coronavirus hospitalization figures for weeks. On Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that 827 people have been hospitalized in Texas. But the true number of cases is likely far higher than the official tally due to a shortage of reliable tests and delays in delivering results, which can take up to 10 days.
Even with the limited number of confirmed positives, Harris County’s top epidemiologist says it feels like her team is constantly behind.
“It’s become overwhelming,” said Dr. Dana Beckham, director of the county’s Office of Science, Surveillance and Technology, which traces the steps of people who test positive for COVID-19 to determine how they got the disease and who they may have infected. “We’re always behind the eight ball.”
The county’s epidemiologists were pulling 12-to-16-hour days, seven days a week and they still couldn’t keep up, Beckham said. They brought in more workers – roping in other county government employees and hiring outside contractors – to prevent burnout and alleviate stress, tripling the number of people working in the unit to about 65.
It’s still not enough, she said.
As health officials scramble to mitigate the worst pandemic in generations, the level of detail released by Texas lags behind that of some counties and cities.
The Texas Department of State Health Services publishes a daily update of the official number of confirmed coronavirus cases — there were 5,330 statewide as of Saturday and 90 deaths. But the agency doesn’t routinely publish other key measurements that could show the potential for strain on Texas’ health care system in the coming weeks.
[…]
The 827 hospitalized coronavirus patients in Texas are confirmed COVID-19 cases — not suspected cases in which patients are exhibiting symptoms but have no test results, said Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for DSHS.
Front-line health care workers in the Houston area have told the Houston Chronicle that many patients who should be tested and hospitalized are slipping through the cracks. They also worry that patients admitted with other conditions, such as a heart attack, who also are showing symptoms of the virus may not show up in overall counts.
Unconfirmed COVID-19 cases are likely taking up a significant number of hospital beds. According to the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Committee, an organization tasked with tracking medical resources in Houston and the surrounding area, as of Thursday more than 700 patients with COVID-19 symptoms — which includes confirmed and suspected cases — had been hospitalized in Harris County alone.
More than 240 were being treated in intensive care units in the county, which has about 4.7 million residents. There were 480 patients on ventilators as of Thursday and 684 additional ventilators were available.
“Currently, we do not have any hospitals reporting that they are nearing capacity,” Darrell Pile, SETRAC’s chief executive officer, told the Chronicle in an email. “Available beds can actually rise if a hospital opens a closed wing, or opts to use beds in the recovery room or other specialty areas to care for inpatients.”
Van Deusen said the state health department had initially collected statistics on suspected cases from hospitals, but by Tuesday had only received reports on 629 patients statewide, raising questions about the accuracy of the state’s figures.
“Hospitalization reporting is a work in progress, and we’re definitely still refining the process,” Van Deusen said.
There’s too much to summarize, so I’d advise you to read that story and also this story about why the official reported numbers of COVID-19 cases in Texas is likely an order of magnitude too low. We’re not doing much testing, which means we can’t really track where the disease is trending, and we’re really just guessing about our hospital capacity and the potential for it to be overwhelmed. We can’t really tell if the local stay-at-home orders, which are now two weeks old, or the previous orders closing schools and canceling public events, which are coming up on four weeks’ duration, have had any effect on flattening the curve. The peak of the outbreak is likely still three or four weeks from now, so whatever the numbers are today, they are going to be a lot higher in the near future. That best-case IHME study Abbott is touting projects four to five thousand deaths in Texas; as of Sunday the official count was 127. That count is also likely low, for the same reasons – not everyone who needs it is getting tested, COVID-19 may be one of several causes of death but not the “official” one, etc – but the point is, we’re barely on the upswing of the curve. We have a lot of staying at home yet to do.
The third most populous county in the nation doing about 250 tests per day as of earlier this week is pathetic.
I think that the numbers (for everywhere in the world) will be debated for years to come, if there is a future for humans for years to come.
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