(CNN)Inside a Houston hospital partly transformed into a coronavirus specialty unit, one doctor says he expects to reach capacity in the next 14 days.
“In the last three weeks, I have seen more admissions and sicker patients than on the previous ten weeks,” says Dr. Joseph Varon, the chief medical officer at United Memorial Medical Center. “It’s been an exponential increase on the severity of illness and on the number of cases that we admit.”
In other hospitals across America, similar scenes.
At least 12 states are seeing a rise in daily hospitalizations, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week.
The trend is worrying: a sharp increase in patients can once again overwhelm hospitals, putting critical resources including staffing, beds and ventilators in short supply.
Some hospitals are already so swamped they’ve transferred patients elsewhere, while others are taking steps to prepare for a coming surge.
The increases come weeks after many states began reopening their economies after extended closures intended to stem the spread of coronavirus.
The relaxed measures fueled the rapid spread of the virus and an influx of new patients needing hospitalization, some doctors say.
“I live close to a beach, and you can see it’s like a party every single day,” says Dr. David De La Zerda, the ICU medical director and a pulmonologist at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.
Among the states seeing an increase are Florida and Texas, which are expected to see nearly 2,000 new hospitalizations per day by mid-July, according to forecasts published by the CDC. In Arizona and California, the forecasts project about 1,500 new patients each day in the next two weeks.
Houston hospitals transferred patients out
In Harris County, which encompasses Houston and is the most populous county in Texas, at least two hospitals are “pretty much at maximum capacity,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said Wednesday.
“The threat … Covid-19 poses to our community right now is higher than it has been. There is a severe and uncontrolled spread between our families, friends, and communities,” Turner said. “And we need to slow it down, so that it doesn’t overwhelm our healthcare delivery system.”
Several hospitals across Houston are still within capacity limits, he said, except two facilities within the Harris Health System that had to spread “that load around,” Turner said.
“It really has intensified in the last month or so,” Charlie McMurray-Horton, the associate administrator for Clinical Integration and Transformation at the Harris Health System told CNN affiliate KTRK.
“We are actively trying to transfer out ICU and surge patients that are COVID positive and under investigation, just because we don’t have the capacity to treat those patients,” McMurray-Horton said.
On July 1, Texas reported 6,904 total hospitalizations — a staggering record high and an increase of more than 2,500 patients in a week. The state’s peak of hospitalizations in May was 1,888.
“The numbers today, this week, over the last several weeks are far worse than the numbers in March, and April, and May. So if we stay on the current trajectory, we are going to run into problems with capacity,” Turner said.
