The coronavirus has surged in Texas since June, threatening, at times, to overwhelm hospitals there. But the trend over the last 10 days or so suggests that the surge is plateauing, indicating that the state’s hospitals may avoid a worst-case scenario after policymakers and the public scrambled to rein in the spread.
“The hospitalizations in North Texas are stabilizing,” said Stephen Love, president and CEO of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council. “We still have approximately 2,000 COVID-19 patients in our hospitals, but the rate of increase has leveled off and is slowing down, especially compared to two to three weeks ago.”
Available intensive care beds, one measure of the severity of the pandemic, fell below 250 on July 9 in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, based on data from the Texas Department of State Health Services. It had risen to 370 on Tuesday. Statewide, the number of ICU beds has increased to 1,088 from 930 on July 10.
“Hospitalizations have plateaued,” said Dr. David Lakey, vice chancellor for health affairs and chief medical officer at the University of Texas System. “That’s a real hard number you can look at related to how things are going.” COVID-19 hospitalizations have hovered around 10,600 in the Lone Star State over the last week.
But what happens statewide is not necessarily reflected in local areas. Indeed, even areas that are close to each other can have very different experiences.
Texas Medical Center in Houston, for example, has experienced improvement, with no growth in COVID-19 cases in its ICU for the last week.
But Darrell Pile, CEO of the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council, painted a bleaker picture.
“Demand for hospital beds continues to surpass the availability of staffed beds,” he said of the Southeast area of the state, which includes Houston. He stated that 188 patients were still waiting for a hospital bed, and 47 of those were waiting for an ICU bed. “In fact, eight hospitals have three or more patients needing an ICU bed,” he added.
On the positive side, he noted that the number of emergency departments listed as saturated has declined.
Yet Texas has not seen a surge of new cases more than two weeks after the July 4 weekend, noted Angela Clendenin, instructional assistant professor at Texas A&M School of Public Health.
“After Memorial Day weekend, we saw a big surge in hospitalizations,” she said. “When you come to another big national holiday, you anticipate seeing another big surge, but we haven’t seen that yet.”
She also stated that while she was cautiously optimistic, she wouldn’t yet call the trend in Texas a stabilization.
“COVID is playing out a little different here than the East Coast,” stated Lakey. “It is a younger population here in Texas.” About 85% of cases in Texas are under age 65, versus 69% for New York City. He also emphasized that hospitals know more about effectively treating COVID-19 than they did three months ago.
In early June, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, reimposed some restrictions, including closing bars and putting limits on elective surgery.
Clendenin added that public awareness might also be a factor.
“I think when people saw the case numbers continue to increase … I think people anticipated some mandates coming down and changed their behavior,” she said. “And so they went back to wearing masks appropriately and really focusing on that social distancing.”
She added, “I think until the reproductive rate of the virus is below one in this country for a couple of weeks, you can’t say you are out of the woods.”
A reproductive rate below one means the virus will stop spreading. One month ago, Texas stood at 1.05. At present, it stands at one.
