Some hospitals in Texas along the southern border are at capacity for patients, partially due to people from Mexico seeking treatment at facilities in the United States.
Hospitals in the Rio Grande Valley are coping with an increase in patients, according to local outlet Valley Central, with doctors legally obligated to treat patients who come to their facilities regardless of their country of origin.
“We are giving care to our population, but also to patients from Mexico, by law we must give medical attention to anyone who comes to our hospitals,” said Dr. Ivonne Lopez, M.D., medical director of McAllen Hospital Group at McAllen Medical Center, last week.
“One of the factors is the border. We in McAllen Medical are receiving many patients from Mexico. They are coming in because their resources over there are also limited, so they are coming into our area seeking medical attention, and by law we have to provide it,” Lopez added. “The patients that cross the border say, ‘We don’t have hospital space over there, the oxygen is gone, we don’t have medications, so we cross the border.’ That’s the situation in the border.”
Another doctor in the area, Ivan Melendez, echoed Lopez’s remarks on patients coming from Mexico due to the state of hospitals in the country.
“Contacts I have from my friends that are in Matamoros and Reynosa paint quite a grim story. That story shows hospitals packaged to the gills. There aren’t any beds. People can’t come in. I had one day someone send me a list of 45 people in a particular hospital in Reynosa and 45 people out of 45 beds diagnosed with a typical pneumonia, and I called him, and he said, ‘We don’t have tests, so we’re assuming they’re COVID,’” said Melendez.
Melendez said he doesn’t have an exact number on how many people from Mexico are seeking treatment in the U.S.
“The river is a poor area, and we know people are coming over, and yes, we see people coming over that indeed are Mexican nationals, but do I see it as a predominate amount? No. Do I have a number? No. Is it anecdotal? I believe so, at least in the McAllen area. I believe the great majority of our folks are local folks,” said Melendez. “So are they coming? Yes, but not in large numbers, they are not taking our resources.”
Texas officials say the state is reporting an average of 100 coronavirus deaths daily, and researchers warned Friday that the number will increase.
“It’s clear the pandemic has been surging in Texas for about the past four weeks, and we can see through looking at the hospitalization trends how they’ve increased over the past four weeks. We expect mortality, therefore, to follow that hospitalization, so we should expect mortality to continue to increase for at least four weeks,” Dr. Spencer Fox, associate director of the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, said.
Rep. Chip Roy tweeted earlier in July that the border is causing a surge in coronavirus cases in the state.
“Important data here,” the Texas Republican wrote, accompanied by data on the increases. “The border is driving the problem, and anecdotally the hospitals are overwhelmed along the border.”
Important data here. The border is driving the problem, and anecdotally the hospitals are overwhelmed along the border. https://t.co/mcsqAfVmjl
— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) July 8, 2020
Senior editor at the Conservative Review, Daniel Horowitz, agreed with Roy’s tweet in an opinion piece he wrote titled “The worst Texas coronavirus increase? On the BORDER.”
“Hidalgo County, Texas, which contains the main international border crossing in the Rio Grande Valley, experienced a 641% increase in cases per thousand residents from June 1 to July 2,” Horowitz wrote. “Harris County [Houston], by comparison, experienced just a 167% increase, which is more in line with the rate of increase in testing.”
