What’s happening in Houston draws eerie parallels to New York City in late March, when every day brought steep increases in the number of patients seeking care at overburdened hospitals — though, so far, with far fewer deaths. But as coronavirus cases surge in Texas, state officials here have not reimplemented the same lockdown measures that experts say helped bring New York’s outbreak under control, raising concern among public health officials that Houston won’t be able to flatten the curve.
“The time to act and time to be alarmed is not when you’ve hit capacity, but it’s much earlier when you start to see hospitalizations increase at a very fast rate,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of integrative biology who leads the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. “It is definitely time to take some kind of action. It is time to be alarmed.”
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Hospitals in Houston and elsewhere in the country temporarily halted outpatient visits and elective surgeries in March and April as the coronavirus pandemic took hold on the East Coast — a move that not only hurt hospital revenues, Boom said, but also forced many patients to delay critical procedures, including heart surgeries.
Boom and other hospital leaders said the earlier restrictions also led some patients to avoid going to the hospital after suffering symptoms of heart attacks or strokes, leading to potentially deadly delays in care.
Vivian Ho, an economics professor at Rice University, said hospitals want to protect their fiscal health and the health of patients, both those with COVID-19 and those with other conditions, while also preventing themselves from becoming overwhelmed down the line.
Elective surgeries deliver a far better financial return than ICU wards full of patients with COVID-19.
“They would prefer to tell the public that this is extremely dangerous,” she said, “but they can’t, in part, because they have to keep performing these elective surgeries, and for the most part, that is safe.”
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