Emergency room doctors in Southeast Texas say they are running out of hospital beds, and some patients are waiting hours, sometimes days to be admitted into a hospital.
“Are there patients dying because of this that might not have died? Absolutely, yes,” said Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council CEO, Darrell Pile. “I am very concerned about the fatalities that are about to happen.”
As of Friday afternoon, Pile says 482 patients were waiting for hospital beds in his 25-county region. He said 211 of those patients are COVID-19 positive.
An additional 120 patients are waiting for an ICU bed. Of those patients, 65 are COVID-19 positive.
“The poor nurses and doctors and respiratory therapists can’t see all the patients that are mounting in the lobby, and now we have patients waiting in parking lots and we have patients waiting in the back of ambulances in parking lots. It’s a gridlock at the emergency department level,” Pile told KPRC 2.
The SETRAC CEO says the Southeast Texas region is short about 2,000 nurses, which he says is the main reason behind the bed shortage.
“It’s a situation where a patient, after waiting hours, may get into an emergency department room with a curtain drawn and be assessed and be decided they need to be admitted, but there’s nowhere to go, and that’s where they stay for hours and hours and maybe days,” said Pile.
In some cases, he says patients are being flown out of state to places like Louisiana, Utah, Colorado, North Dakota and Minnesota, instead of going to the Texas Medical Center.
“We are used to being the place where patients fly to. They come here,” he said.
At Altus Baytown, a freestanding ER, Dr. Robert Velarde said they are facing something they have never seen before.
“For us, this is the worst surge since COVID has started,” Dr. Velarde told KPRC 2. “It’s hectic. It’s tiring. It’s stressful.”
Due to a lack of hospital beds, if patients need to be admitted into a hospital for more specialized care, he says the delay is overwhelming.
“We are trying to treat the patient who should be in the ICU in the emergency room. They are not getting the full supervision or maintenance they need,” he said.
Dr. Velarde says his ER staff has spent hours on the phone looking for hospitals that can accept his patients. In fact, they have even used Google to find hospitals across the country that may have open beds.
“If I want a COVID bed, I have to be calling like 50 to 60 hospitals a day just to find one,” said Dr. Velarde. “They even hired a person here just to come and make calls trying to find a bed for the patient.”
And governors in these states are either doing nothing, are prevented from doing anything by GOP legislatures, or both. We're seeing triage measures at best. We need to be back in lockdown mode, but nobody will tolerate it. The violence would kill people too. Southern GOP states are out of resources and governors are doing things like "requesting more nurses" and turning libraries into field hospitals, instead of telling people to get the vaccine and otherwise stay home.
We're at the breaking point now.
By the way, the FDA is expected to announce that the Pfizer vaccine is getting full approval as early as today, which means more vaccine mandates are going to be coming. A new USA Today/Ipsos poll out Monday finds more than 70% of Americans support public mask mandates as 'a matter of health and safety" and more than 60% support vaccine mandates.
The problem, in the same poll, is that 20% of Americans say they will never get the vaccine, regardless of mandates. Some 70% of Americans say that employers, universities, airlines, restaurants, and other businesses should be able to refuse service to the unvaccinated.
That's the next big fight over the months ahead, and I fully expect the US Supreme Court to step in, maybe even before the end of the year.
We'll see where we go, but the next couple of months at least are going to be abysmal.
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