Coronavirus slams Houston hospitals
HOUSTON — Over the past week, Aric Bakshy, an emergency physician at Houston Methodist, had to decide which coronavirus patients he should admit to the increasingly busy hospital and which he could safely send home.
To discuss questions like these, he has turned to doctors at hospitals where he trained in New York City that were overwhelmed by the coronavirus this spring. Now their situations are reversed.
Thumbing through a dogeared notebook during a recent shift, Bakshy counted about a dozen people he had treated for coronavirus symptoms. His colleagues in Houston had attended to many more. Meanwhile, friends at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, N.Y., told him that their emergency department was seeing only one or two virus patients a day. “The surge is here,” Bakshy said.
As Houston’s hospitals face the worst outbreak of the virus in Texas, now one of the nation’s hot zones, Bakshy and others are experiencing some of the same challenges that their New York counterparts did just a few months ago and are trying to adapt some lessons from that crisis.
Like New York City in March, the Houston hospitals are experiencing a steep rise in caseloads that is filling their beds, stretching their staffing, creating a backlog in testing and limiting the availability of other medical services. Attempts to buy more supplies — including certain protective gear, vitalsign monitors and testing components — are frustrated by weeks of delays, according to hospital leaders.
Methodist is swiftly expanding capacity and hiring more staff, including local nurses who had left their jobs to work in New York when the city’s hospitals were pummeled. “A bed’s a bed until you have a staff,” said Avery Taylor, the nurse manager of a coronavirus unit created just outside Houston in March.
But with the virus raging across the region, medical workers are falling ill. Bakshy was one of the first at Methodist to have COVID-19, getting it in early March. As of this past week, the number of nurses being hired to help open new units would only replace those out sick.
Methodist, a top-ranked system of eight hospitals, had nearly 400 coronavirus inpatients last Sunday. Nearly a week later — even as physicians tried to be conservative in admitting patients and discharged others as soon as they safely could — the figure was 569. The flagship hospital added 130 inpatient beds in recent days and rapidly filled them. Now, administrators estimate that the number of COVID-19 patients across the system could reach 800 or 900 in coming weeks, and are planning to accommodate up to 1,000.
Other Houston hospitals are seeing similar streams of patients. Inundated public hospitals are sending some patients to private institutions like Methodist while reportedly transferring others to Galveston, 50 miles away.
“What’s been disheartening over the past week or two has been that it feels like we’re back at square one,” Dr. Mir Alikhan, a pulmonary and critical care specialist, said to his medical team before rounds. “It’s really a terrible kind of sinking feeling. But we’re not truly back at square one, right? Because we have the last three months of expertise that we’ve developed.”
Houston’s hospitals have some advantages compared with New York’s in the spring. Doctors know more now about how to manage the sickest patients and are more often able to avoid breathing tubes, ventilators and critical care. But one treatment shown to shorten hospital stays, the antiviral drug remdesivir, is being allocated by the state, and hospitals here have repeatedly run out of it.
Methodist’s leaders, who were planning for a surge and had been dealing with a stream of coronavirus patients since March, pointed to the most important difference between Houston now and New York then: the patient mix. The majority of new patients in Houston are younger and healthier and are not as severely ill as many were in New York City, where officials report that over 22,000 are likely to have died from the disease.
But so far, the death toll has not climbed much in Texas and other parts of the South and West seeing a surge. “We are having to pioneer the way of trying to understand a different curve with some very good characteristics versus the last curve,” said Dr. Marc Boom, Methodist’s president and chief executive.
But he cautioned, “What I’m watching really closely is whether we see a shift back in age — because if the young really get this way out there and then start infecting all of the older, then we may look more like the last wave.”
Dr. Sylvie de Souza, head of the emergency department at Brooklyn Hospital Center, which on Friday reported no new coronavirus admissions and no current inpatient cases, said she was receiving distressing text messages from doctors elsewhere in the country asking for advice. “It’s disappointing,” she said. “It sort of brings me back to the end of March, and it’s like being there all over again.”
Many hospitals in New York during the earlier crisis essentially became all-COVID units and endured billions of dollars in losses.
But Methodist and some other private Houston institutions are trying to operate differently now after taking a financial beating from shutting down elective surgeries and procedures this spring.
With safety protocols and expansion plans in place, they are trying to maintain as many services as possible for as long as possible while contending with the flood of coronavirus cases. “No one’s ever done that before,” Boom said. “We were seeing all the harm from patients delaying care.”
Doctors and nurses have combed through lists of surgical patients, choosing whom to delay. The easiest surgeries to maintain are those that do not require a hospital stay, like treatment for cataracts. Some surgeons who used to keep patients overnight after knee and hip replacements are now allowing them to leave the same day.