» With Laura threatening, staff at area hospitals are taking extra precautions.
Staff gathers supplies, equipment for more patients, COVID-19 spread
Hurricane Laura is the last thing any hospital needs in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic that has sickened more than 144,000 people in the Houston region.
With Laura threatening to make landfall as soon as Wednesday night in southeast Texas, staff are scrambling to stockpile personal protective equipment and revisiting disaster preparedness plans in advance of what could become a powerful and destructive storm. They also are preparing for another jump in COVID-19 cases if the hurricane forces large numbers of people into shelters.
The pandemic already has hampered normal operations at most medical centers. Staff have increasingly relied on telemedicine technology to see patients whose symptoms or checkups don’t require in-person visits. Hospital beds have been allocated to COVID-19 patients, especially during peaks of virus cases.
Now, with fewer than 900 hospitalizations in the Houston area, compared to almost 2,700 at the peak in July, hospital leaders and emergency staff say they can scale back the number of beds allotted to treat COVID-19 patients and begin setting them aside for people who may be hurt in the storm.
“Keep in mind COVID was not part of the equation during Hurricane Harvey,” said Darrell Pile, CEO of the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council, or SETRAC.
Coronavirus patients make up about 21 percent of patients in Harris County’s intensive care units now and occupy about 10 percent of overall hospital beds, according to SETRAC.
Across the region, Pile said, hospitals have the capacity to care for additional patients and have plans in place in case they need to be transferred to other health care providers due to flooding or lack of capacity.
Making room
At United Memorial Medical Center in Acres Homes, where doctors and nurses have spent months caring for the sickest of coronavirus patients, hospital leaders plan to apportion beds from
their COVID-19 unit to possible storm victims, and do the same in a ward where U.S. Army medics have set up a separate operation to treat COVID-19 patients.
Dr. Joseph Varon, chief medical officer of United Memorial Medical Center, said the plan is to allocate half the beds to COVID-19 and the other half to anyone who comes in with stormrelated injuries.
Varon has prepared his staff to take in overflow from other Texas hospitals if they become overwhelmed by both storm-related injuries and COVID-19 patients.
‘Going to get sick’
“People are going to go into shelters and close confined spaces because of the storm,” Varon said. “People are going to get sick, no question about it.”
Nurses have been asked to bring several changes of clothes to the medical center in case they must stay. Backup generators are in place, and oxygen tanks have been topped off, he said.
Throughout Houston, hospital maintenance staff are checking backup systems and buying more personal protective equipment to ensure that they don’t run out during the hurricane, much like some did in the early weeks of the pandemic.
At Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in the Texas Medical Center, and eight other CHI St. Luke’s locations in the Houston region, there are enough face masks, disposable gloves and other personal protective equipment to last the staff and its patients for weeks, said Liz Youngblood, chief operating officer of CHI St. Luke’s Texas division.
The system has stationed “ride out teams,” staff members who have volunteered to come in and stay the duration of the storm if the hospital needs more doctors, nurses and other practitioners, and they can’t drive into the hospital due to flooded streets.
“We’ve been preparing for well over a week now to make sure everything in place,” Youngblood said.
‘Triple whammy’
Multiple times a day, a monitoring system for CHI St. Luke’s 17 Texas hospitals will check on capacity and available beds. The hospitals are prepared to send patients to other locations if there’s a need to evacuate.
The hope is that it doesn’t come to that, with flood gates installed throughout the Texas Medical Center in the wake of Tropical Storm Allison.
The flood gates can close and prevent water from submerging the lower floors of medical institutions.
There’s another threat, though. If people aren’t careful to maintain social distancing and mask-wearing if the hurricane veers into Houston, large outbreaks of COVID-19 cases could follow, driving up hospitalization rates again.
“We have a hurricane coming in, we just opened schools and we have Labor Day weekend coming up,” said Varon of the United Memorial Medical Center. “It’s like a triple whammy.”