TMC chief: 18% of new cases are kids
In Texas, the deltafueled surge already has surpassed all previous COVID peaks and is still growing fast. What does that mean for Houston? For our hospitals and the people who work in them? And for Texas kids as school reopens?
We’re talking this week with Bill McKeon, president and CEO of the Texas Medical Center.
Could we start with an overview of what is going on now with COVID-19? What are you seeing at the Texas Medical Center?
What we’re seeing, sadly, is more of the same, only with more intense numbers. The number of people who are testing positive in our community continues to escalate month over month. The test positivity rate is now at 15.1 percent.
But probably the most accurate reflection is our hospitalizations. We just reached an all-time high: 421 people were admitted to our hospitals for COVID (Wednesday).
Step back for a second and look at that relative to the entire pandemic. Back in June and July, we had two weeks where the average number of hospital admissions was over 300. That was in the sec
ond wave.
Fast forward to Wave 3: We had four weeks that averaged over 300.
Now we are into our second week with no slowing the pace. At 421, we are seeing the highest peak of all of the pandemic going back 18 months now.
It’s largely a pandemic of the unwilling — people unwilling to be vaccinated. Now 44 percent of Houstonians are unvaccinated. Those are the vast majority of the people that are showing up in our emergency rooms and and in our ICUs. They’re very sick.
Many people thought that they were young, and therefore their immune system would be strong enough to protect them.
That is not the case with this deadly delta variant, which is three times more transmissible than the earlier alpha variant.
Our hospitals’ staffs are 18 months into this. They’re exhausted. And we have far fewer nurses than we used to have. They’re being recruited to other states, like Florida, that are even worse off than Texas.
The saddest fact is, 18 percent of all the new cases so far in August are children.
With the alpha variant, everyone thought, “OK, it’s 65 and older.” So we went after the nursing homes, and we did a brilliant job at protecting the elderly population and those who are immunocompromised.
But now, that vulnerable population is children under 12, who are not able to be vaccinated. We are predicting a mess in our schools. With nearly 20 percent of new cases being children, now we’re going to huddle them together in schools? Some may have masks. Some may not. It’s a recipe for disaster.
How is the Texas Medical Center’s capacity holding up?
When we describe our capacity, we focus on ICUs because that’s usually the pinch point for any hospital around the country. We are blessed here that, because of our great institutions, we attract patients from all around the world, so we have much greater capacity than most cities would have. The Texas Medical Center is the largest “medical city” in the world. We have plentiful beds.
We describe our surge capacity in three phases. Phase 1 — normal capacity — is 1,330 ICU beds. Phase 2 is an additional 373. At this point in time, with Phase 2 activated, we’re at 84 percent capacity. And in Phase 3, we could even expand to an additional 504 beds.
But if you ask all the hospitals around in the medical center, the number of beds is not our pinch point. It’s actually the number of nurses that have to have the right expertise — it’s largely around respiratory therapy.
In the ICU, those COVID patients are typically inverted. Some are on respirators. The sickest of the sick will be on an ECMO. It takes real training for technicians, nurses and doctors to manage respiratory therapy.
It’s been hard on our staffs. We’re 18 months into the pandemic now, and there’s PTSD here. These are people who are holding the hands of the people who die — more than 6,000 people have died from this at the Texas Medical Center, alone without their family.
Many of our health care workers’ hearts are broken. Because we have the vaccines available, we could have avoided this devastation of our hospitals.
The COVID hospitalizations also impact people that have cancer and heart disease and other things that need to be treated. They’re equally as deserving of treatment as COVID patients. But we’re delaying many of their procedures because of this large onslaught of people who could have prevented the vast majority of this with two shots in the arm.
What percentage of cases are delta variant?
It’s amazing to see how it’s grown. Early when we detected it, it was maybe 2 to 5 percent of cases. Now, invariably, all the cases are delta.
What we’re seeing is a combination of two things: a variant that’s three times more transmissible than the original; and a community where 44 percent of eligible people are unvaccinated.
Our hospital admissions show what’s happening. The COVID patients now are so much younger. They’re in their 20s and 30s. And we’re losing them. They are not invulnerable.
Imagine having to turn to a 20-year-old and tell them you’re about to turn them over and put a respirator down their throat and paralyze their body. Then they don’t feel so invulnerable. It’s heartbreaking to see.
But the politics have been blinding. People have been misinformed.
The White House is recommending a booster shot for people who were vaccinated eight months before. What are your thoughts?
It’s outstanding. We’ve already started to give boosters to immunocompromised people — cancer patients or people who have a complexity in their health that requires them to be vaccinated. We anticipate will probably in the next two weeks receive the CDC recommendation to start vaccinating. We’ll start with healthcare workers, and then we’ll migrate to our 65 and above population.
How much does the medical center have to gear up to do more vaccinations?
We are already ready.