Headlines with words such as “Houston hospitals” and “100% capacity” would have you think the city is about to start looking like Milan did back in March. It isn’t so.
Alarms set off by that number drove the Texas Medical Center, a “medical city” consisting of numerous Houston-area hospitals, to reorganize its hospital capacity data and to better contextualize it.
“Just that number is being misinterpreted and, quite frankly, we’re concerned that there is a level of alarm in the community that is unwarranted right now,” Dr. Marc Boom, the president and CEO of Houston Methodist Hospital, said last week in a Zoom call with other Houston hospital leaders.
Hospital capacity is incredibly fluid, as Boom explained on the call, with shifting beds and staffing adjustments an ongoing affair. He also noted that as a rule, hospitals actually try to operate as near to capacity as possible in order to maximize resources and minimize cost burdens. Boom said numbers from one year ago, June 25, 2019, show that capacity was at 95%.
Remember that COVID-19 wasn’t around back then.
Mark Wallace, the president and CEO of Texas Children’s Hospital, offered an even more frank and encouraging perspective on the same call. “There is not a scenario, in my opinion, to where the demand for our beds, especially ICUs, ventilators, PPE, etc., would eclipse our capability,” Wallace said.
Boom also stressed that the current scenario on the ground is starkly different from March and April, with a shift in demographics and outcomes. “We are seeing younger patients, we are seeing a shorter length of stay, we are seeing lower mortality, and we are seeing lower ICU utilization right now,” he said.
A proper understanding of hospital capacity (and of what kinds of people are hospitalized and for how long) is crucial. Recent poll numbers from Gallup have 37% of respondents, a plurality, saying they think the coronavirus situation is getting a lot worse — a dubious conclusion, considering the current death rates and hospitalization dynamics.
The Houston hospital executives expressed concern about rising case numbers and urged people to wear masks and practice social distancing, yet they also told a much more encouraging story than press reports are letting on about the state of the city’s hospitals. Obviously, we don’t want hospitalization numbers to increase, but as Boom points out, capacity in intensive care units is typically high, and at least in his system, it is structured to evolve as needed. And importantly, not all hospitalizations are equally grave, and the hospitals are not currently straining under the burden of cases.
To be sure, not all environments are exactly like Houston. But the details matter, and these reassurances from leaders of local hospitals at least provide a better, less panicked understanding of what’s happening in one current virus hot spot.
