Fourth COVID wave on horizon
Local medical leaders say delta variant surge could overwhelm ERs
One local hospital is reinstating visitor limits and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo is mulling a change to the county’s threat level amid a wave of COVID-19 variant cases that medical leaders warned Tuesday could overwhelm area hospitals and wreak further havoc as schools reopen next month.
The warning came amid massive spikes in hospitalizations across the Houston region, which Hidalgo’s office is closely monitoring to decide if the county needs to raise its emergency threat level from yellow to orange — or moderate to significant.
“We’re watching this very, very closely,” Hidalgo spokesperson Rafael Lemaitre wrote in an email. “The trends are moving in the wrong direction again and we are in a high-stakes race against the delta variant of this virus. Our message to the community is simple and clear: If you haven’t been vaccinated, take action now.”
In May, Hidalgo lowered the
threat level from red — where it had been for nearly a year — to orange, then yellow a few weeks later, as COVID cases waned statewide.
But this month, hospitalizations across the state have more than doubled, ballooning from 1,591 on July 1 to 3,319 as of Tuesday, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. The state’s hospitalization count peaked in January at 14,000.
Texas Medical Center CEO William McKeon said he fears the closing of many testing centers will make it more difficult to gauge the extent of COVID’s spread in the coming weeks.
“As this fourth wave begins in force, our radar is down,” Texas Medical Center CEO William McKeon said in a Tuesday conference call with reporters. “We have only a fraction of the testing…. We’re going to be running much more blind to the spread of delta variant in our community.”
As of Tuesday, 51 percent of Texans older than 12 have been fully vaccinated and 59 percent have received at least one dose, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Memorial-Hermann Health System plans to readopt visitor restrictions this week and will test all patients for COVID, regardless of their vaccination status, said Dr. Annamaria Macaluso Davidson, vice president of employee health medical operations.
The hospital system had about 100 confirmed COVID cases on July 4; by Tuesday, there were more than 250.
Davidson said now is a crucial time for vaccinations, particularly among those who work in schools, which will reopen in roughly six weeks — the same amount of time it takes to develop full antibodies through inoculation.
“This is a great time to get vaccinated,” she said. “We know the delta variant is spreading rapidly in the community.”
On Monday, Houston Methodist Hospital reported a 70 percent increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations in the last week, nearly all of them delta variant cases among those who have not been vaccinated.
Methodist Hospital also reported its first recorded case of the lambda variant, which originated last year in Peru and has devastated many Latin American countries.
Meanwhile, the more contagious delta variant is likely to continue wreaking havoc across Southeast Texas, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital.
“Delta will accelerate, and it will accelerate the most in places where vaccination rates are low” including many rural parts of Texas, Hotez said during a call with reporters Tuesday morning.
He and other hospitals leaders on the call also noted this wave will come as testing centers remain closed, schools welcome back students and many people discard masks and other precautions ahead of a potentially serious flu season.
An influx of COVID also has the potential to overwhelm hospitals as more people continue to seek elective surgeries that they delayed during the height of the pandemic, or seek emergency room care now that they feel more comfortable in hospitals, said Baylor College of Medicine President Paul Klotman.
“There is a lot of pent-up medical need,” he said.