Limited supplies of drug sent out
Virus cases far exceed doses of treatment heralded by Abbott
Texas has received 5,800 doses of the newly approved coronavirus treatment that Gov. Greg Abbott touted on Thursday and will receive even less next week, underscoring the massive challenge that remains as the state scrambles to tamp down its latest outbreak.
While the medication, made by Eli Lilly, iswelcome news to many in the state’s health care community, its supplies are so limited that some hospitals are weighing howto ethically prioritize eligible patients, and others have opted out altogether.
“We recognize that this therapy could provide some modest benefit, but it requires space, staff and additional training around infusions that are hard to come by right now, as we are currently strained just taking care of the patients we have in house,” said Dr. Ann Barnes, the executive vice president and chief medical executive at Harris Health System in Houston.
The hospital network, which
includes Ben Taub and Lyndon B. Johnson hospitals, decided earlier thisweek to decline shipments of the treatment, called bamlanivimab. The medication is designed to neutralize the virus, preventing severe symptoms from developing. It was unclear if any other hospitals in the state had made similar decisions. Officials at multiple hospitals did not respond to requests for comment.
Abbott held a news conference on Thursday to tout the treatment, at one point displaying a poster-size photo of an IV bag and a patient’s arm. “All it takes is one hour, and then the treatment is complete,” he said, while declining to disclose howmany doseswere available.
Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Hospital Association, said executives huddled Tuesday with state leaders and “were largely very supportive of having the opportunity to have their hands on this therapeutic.”
“It’s an outpatient infusion therapy and requires significant space and staff time, which obviously is taxed right now,” Williams said in an email. “That said, we welcome all the help we can get to decrease demand on hospitals right now.”
Texas is expected to receive another 3,200 doses next week, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That would make it the second largest state recipient, just behind Illinois.
Still, it’s not keeping pace with Texas’ mounting infections. Health officials reported more than 50,000 new positive cases this week through Friday alone, and there are 152,000 estimated active cases statewide. More than 8,000 people were hospi
talized with the virus as of Friday.
And the drug is not a cure-all; in clinical trials, it was shown to reduce hospitalizations among high-risk patients but not eliminate them. Federal officials have said they expect close to 400,000 doses to be available nationwide through the end of the year; 80,000 of those have already been distributed.
To be effective, the treatment has to be administered early in an infection, before severe symptoms emerge, and it is meant only for people over age 65 who have chronic conditions such as diabetes or high blood pressure. It’s administered intravenously over the course of an hour.
In Lubbock, where cases are surging and the governor traveled on Thursday, hospitals received172 doses
this week, according to Dr. Drew Payne, a physician and associate program director at Texas Tech University. He said they have
scrambled since to determine how best to get the doses out and hoped to begin administering them over the weekend.
“It’s good to say, ‘Hey, everybody needs this medication and we need to give it out,’ ” Payne said. “But then the logistics of having nursing staff, a place to bring COVID-positive patients into, a way to give that medication, a plan if there’s an adverse reaction to that medication — those are all things we’ve been dealing with.”
Lubbock reported nearly 500 new positive cases on Friday, with 5,700 active cases overall.
Payne added that several patients have been reluctant to take it, claiming they feel fine or don’t believe they’ll develop symptoms.
“Our job as physicians is to advocate for the science and to advocate for our patients and let them know that this iswhat’s out there, this is what we have available,” he said. “But ultimately, it comes down to the patient.”
State leaders have declined to say how many doses are going to each region, and several officials in El Paso, another hot spot, did not respond to requests for comment.
Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said it is being determined by how many new positive cases and hospitalizations a region has reported in the last five days, as well as its total number of COVID hospitalizations.
“We may well end up tweaking that going forward, just based on what we’re seeing,” he said. “It sounded like the governor was interested in sending more of it to the hot spots, so we’re still working on what it’s going to look like.”
El Paso County reported just over 1,000 newpositive cases Friday and had nearly 1,100 patients hospitalized with the virus. The county has recorded more than 800COVID deaths, many of them in the past two months.
Barnes said officials in El Paso may use space in the city’s convention center to administer the treatment. She said Harris Health is preparing for a potential surge in and around Houston in the coming weeks and would consider helping with a similar setup if it came to that.
“My hope is that we could see a collective effort, maybe with the support of the state and staff that is specifically designated to our community, to support this kind of therapy so that we could make it available to all community members in Houston,” she said.