Name: As coronavirus cases rise, so does Austin-area contingency planning
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As coronavirus cases rise, so does Austin-area contingency planning

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Nicole Cobler, and Nicole VillalpandoView CommentsAs Texas saw its eighth consecutive day of record COVID-19 hospitalizations Friday, Austin-area officials began preparing for the possibility — considered remote but growing — that a field hospital might be needed to handle overflow patients.The Austin Convention Center would be converted into an alternative care site if hospitals become overwhelmed, said former Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt, a key decision maker in local efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus,“Here’s hoping we never need an alternative care site, but if we do, we are ready to stand one up,” Eckhardt told the American-Statesman.The site would be able to treat up to 1,500 COVID-19 patients, scaling up in 100-person increments, an Austin/Travis County Emergency Operations Center spokesperson said.After a Friday conference call with Austin-area hospitals, Eckhardt said the region is experiencing an unprecedented number of new coronavirus cases. While she was confident that local hospital systems are up to the challenge, Eckhardt said it made sense to be prepared if the situation worsened.“All three of the (hospital systems) still, as of today, have plenty of capacity and staffing,” she said.All three hospital systems told the Statesman on Friday that no hospital had reached its capacity for treating COVID-19, rejecting rumors to the contrary that circulated Friday via email and social media.“While we currently have capacity in our hospitals to treat all patients, including patients diagnosed with COVID-19, we have the ability to quickly adapt to the needs of our patients and to the health care demands of our community should the need arise,” said DeVry Anderson, chief medical officer at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center.The hospital systems and Austin Public Health would not provide specific hospital capacity numbers when asked.The state reported Friday that 3,148 patients were in hospitals for COVID-19, the first time Texas crossed the 3,000 mark, and state health officials reported 3,454 new cases Friday.The state’s positivity rate, the rolling seven-day number of positive cases divided by the number of tests, increased to 8.5%, a full percentage point higher than the day before.Hospitals within a hospitalHospital systems have created different ways to separate those infected with COVID-19 from other patients. All hospitals do initial screenings at the door, and then send COVID-19 patients to a designated area.“While we have seen an increase in the number of cases recently, it is important to note that the vast majority of our patients — between 90% and 99% of those we treated in our hospitals since March — have been receiving care unrelated to COVID-19,” Baylor Scott &amp; White said in a statement.Ascension Seton has designated two hospitals — Dell Seton Medical Center and Seton Medical Center — as sites where it transfers all COVID-19 patients, freeing capacity at surrounding hospitals and making sure patients with coronavirus are at sites with higher levels of care and equipment. Those two hospitals still treat other patients in non-COVID-19-designated areas.The concerns local hospitals had in February and March are not the same as now, Anderson said, adding that there has been time to establish procedures for isolating patients and to gather ventilators and personal protective equipment.Anderson said St. David’s South Austin Medical Center has noticed a decrease in deaths due to COVID-19.He attributed that to having access to plasma from donors who have already had the virus as well as two medications, an antiviral, remdesivir, and a steroid, dexamethasone, that are being studied with good initial results.“We spent a lot of time ensuring that we got those,” Anderson said.‘Still here and spreading’Meantime, statewide COVID-19 hospitalizations increased by more than 1,000 patients from one week ago.Gov. Greg Abbott sought to quell concerns over hospitalizations Tuesday, reassuring Texans that hospitals around the state can handle the rising numbers.The governor has continued to loosen restrictions that have allowed restaurants, bars and businesses to gradually reopen. On Friday, it was amusement parks and carnivals that were allowed to open at 50% capacity if they were in counties with more than 1,000 confirmed positive cases of the virus.But Shelley Payne, director of the University of Texas’ LaMontagne Center for Infectious Disease, said the state’s growing number of new COVID-19 cases indicates that officials should reconsider reopening the economy.“The cases and hospitalizations have clearly increased over the last week, and I think that tells us that what we’ve been doing is not working, that we need to go back to having more stringent guidelines about mask use and other measures to reduce the spread of the virus,” Payne said.Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said the increased infections this week have come “in a wide variety of venues,” including outbreaks in nursing homes, meatpacking plants and prisons.The department also found additional cases because of relaxed social distancing at bars, beaches and other gatherings across the state, he said.“It really underscores that COVID is still here and spreading in Texas, and people still need to be taking it seriously,” Van Deusen said.The community can do basic things to preserve hospital capacity and stop the spread, but, Anderson stressed, people should not put off going to the hospital for other symptoms.“Wear your mask, wash your hands, maintain appropriate social distancing, this will help us all out,” Anderson said.View Comments

Nicole Cobler, and Nicole VillalpandoView CommentsAs Texas saw its eighth consecutive day of record COVID-19 hospitalizations Friday, Austin-area officials began preparing for the possibility — considered remote but growing — that a field hospital might be needed to handle overflow patients.The Austin Convention Center would be converted into an alternative care site if hospitals become overwhelmed, said former Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt, a key decision maker in local efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus,“Here’s hoping we never need an alternative care site, but if we do,...

As coronavirus cases rise, so does Austin-area contingency planning

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