Texas is suffering

I live in Dallas and the best thing to happen is transplants from the West & East coast's moving here, it has changed so much for the better. Drive an hour east of DFW and you go back in time 100 years. Weirdo religious sects, trucks with confederate flags, and everyone dressed in camo. Those types of people are an embarrassment to humanity.

YMMV wrote:

Demand/availability ratio for hospital beds is under 10%, ICU 40%.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/texas

It's good to know that on a statewide average they're in good shape, but it doesn't change the fact that the particular hospital identified in the original post is apparently turning away critically ill patients.

zxcvzxcv wrote:

beds aren't the issue. ICU beds are. That means a lot of expensive equipment.

Which isn't a problem. Look at the data and don't take what the MSM is telling you for granted. As you can clearly see in one of the hospitols reported to be overrun only 31% of the beds are occupied by COVID patients. Covid patients could double and they wouldn't be out of ICU beds. By the way if you had looked at these numbers a week ago they were almost identical. The surge and that there is going to be exponential growth is a narrative that will not happen unless you ignorantly infect very sick people with the virus which is exactly what they did in New York. As long as we don't start putting COVID patients in nursing homes again we will have adequate capacity.

Osbourne wrote:

The whole state is a joke. The ones who aren't rednecks are fundamentalist maniacs. Actually, and incredibly, some are both. Just a lunatic asylum for low IQ loudmouths. I'm surprised the state government hasn't announced a plan to pray their way out of Covid.

Funny how this kind of talk is fine directed at whites or Christians yet it is hate speech when directed at most other groups. You're probably not smart enough to understand this though.

Monkeys typing wrote:

YMMV wrote:

Demand/availability ratio for hospital beds is under 10%, ICU 40%.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/texas

It's good to know that on a statewide average they're in good shape, but it doesn't change the fact that the particular hospital identified in the original post is apparently turning away critically ill patients.

Critically ill Covid patients or all critically ill patients?

Primo Numero Uno wrote:

zxcvzxcv wrote:

beds aren't the issue. ICU beds are. That means a lot of expensive equipment.

Which isn't a problem. Look at the data and don't take what the MSM is telling you for granted. As you can clearly see in one of the hospitols reported to be overrun only 31% of the beds are occupied by COVID patients. Covid patients could double and they wouldn't be out of ICU beds. By the way if you had looked at these numbers a week ago they were almost identical. The surge and that there is going to be exponential growth is a narrative that will not happen unless you ignorantly infect very sick people with the virus which is exactly what they did in New York. As long as we don't start putting COVID patients in nursing homes again we will have adequate capacity.

That's a good point on the nursing homes: "43% of Coronavirus Deaths in the U.S. Are From Nursing Homes & Long-Term Care Centers."

If the PTB had taken better care of the elderly in nursing homes, total number of deaths would be cut almost in half and there would be no need for all this panic & hysteria.

Texas Medical Center and other hospital systems in Texas have been forced by the state department of health and the Governor to basically lie about their ICU capacity. The Texas Medical Center in June had a graphic on their website showing a point where hospitalizations would become "unsustainable". The governor and the state swooped down and gave them a tongue lashing. They then modified the website to take away any editorializing on what is and is not sustainable and treated ICU capacity like it was a commercial real estate concept and not a health care issue. In that respect, there is always going to be additional ICU capacity because beds used for elective procedures can be converted to additional ICU capacity. But the original intent was to treat ICU capacity holistically and recognize that there were limits on staffing that needed to be considered. So, the original "unsustainable" designation was candid and truthful as the surge in hospitalizations have required shuffling of resources to bring in additional doctors and nurses including using military medical personnel. In a rational world, the government would have heeded the "unsustainable" designation, shut things down and required masks. Gov. Abbott still won't let local governments order shutdowns and overruled mask orders that could have stopped the current surge.

The situation in the Rio Grande Valley is not going to get better. They just got hit by a hurricane and are dealing with flooding. The surge in cases is not being caused by people crossing the border. The surge came from agricultural workers living in dormitory style housing and getting transported to the fields packed into vans and buses, factory workers and through the same issue the rest of the state is experiencing with bars and restaurants and churches being open with little mask wearing.

There has been a peak in hospitalizations in most of the major metros, but there is still a very high volume of cases that is not sustainable. Mask wearing seems to have helped stop the current surge from completely blowing up, but it is hard to tell what is happening as testing capacity has not been able to keep up with demand and we do not have real time data. Most places have a week wait for an appointment for testing and results are taking up to a week. Only in hospital testing is being done timely.

This fall is going to be ugly in Texas if there is no state wide shutdown in the next week or two. Many school districts are planning on offering in person classes with only a hand full of big metro areas ordering schools to be virtual only through October. A lot of suburban and rural districts are planning on being in person and are requiring teachers to report in person for there professional development training starting next week. My wife is a speech language pathologist and just told her school that she will only be available for teletherapy and will resign if she has to be face to face on campus with students. Her school is in one of the hardest hit communities. Most of the kids are Spanish speakers and their parents work in high risk "essential positions. If my wife quits, she will be able to do teletherapy for other districts on a contract basis. Those school districts are having to hire contract workers to do teletherapy because their speech paths have quit or retired because they do not want to catch the virus. And her district will probably have to do the same if she quits.

The virus will definitely surge again in the fall if a significant number of schools go in person. And there is no reason to believe that we will be very far off current infection levels as we go through August. People are still going to restaurants, churches and water parks. Starting in person school with high infection levels will just blow up everything as kids and teachers bring the virus home and spread it all over. Then, hospitals will start seeing the beginning of flu season hospitalizations and will be completely overwhelmed.

This is not an accident or a good faith mistake. This has all been due to the Governor's decision to strip local governments of the authority to implement lockdown measures and the ealier decision to open bars and prohibit local enforcement of mask orders. The Governor did this because he was given hundreds and thousands in campaign donations from his COVID 19 "strike force" in exchange for keeping businesses open.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/data-analytics/texas-medical-center-removes-unsustainable-surge-capacity-label-from-data-charts-as-it-approaches-those-levels.html

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/02/texas-hospital-capacity-coronavirus/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/houston-miami-and-other-cities-face-mounting-health-care-worker-shortages-as-infections-climb/2020/07/25/45fd720c-ccf8-11ea-b0e3-d55bda07d66a_story.html

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/13/890553905/u-s-military-is-sending-medical-staff-to-covid-19-hotspots

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/greg-abbott-coronavirus-task-force-campaign-donors-15423929.php

zxcvzxcv wrote:

The site eliminates non-conforming views on a continual basis. Try posting a thread about Trump's incompetence with the COVID crisis and see how many minutes it lasts.

TBF if you start a thread whose title or content seems to be primarily about Donald Trump, it's gonna get axed. They've been consistent for years with allowing only the one DJT thread. Make your point there!

I have and have had problems with the BrosJo and mods, but I think the one-Trump-thread rule was a really good one. Otherwise the forum's index page would be swamped with NRR Trump threads.

Liberals are officially ruining this country.

can we send trump there?

Texas Department of Health just changed the way it reports fatalities. They had previously been relying on reports from local and regional health departments. Now, they will only use death certificates in order to have a more accurate picture of when people passed away and to track demographics.

Most of the big population centers in Texas are run by Democrats. So, you would think that a new state standard would result in a lower death count by tightening up standards to require the actual death certificate. Nope. The new standard resulted in over 700 previously uncounted deaths to be added on a single day. Looks like someone caught the folks in Austin messing with the numbers.

https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/texas-covid-19-death-numbers-jump/285-19fc2cc4-a1ab-4d28-88a2-e439a176eb60

The IHME estimates for hospital usage are discredited, because they can't even hindcast. IHME hospital usage for New Jersey was completely off base back in April - May, stating things like "projected demand" being multiples of available beds. "Projected demand" is in quotes because by late May, the "projections" for the past were looney-tunes different from reality.

In New Jersey, I heard all the wailing about overwhelmed hospitals. This was lack of context, and in that sense, fake news and fear-mongering.

In New Jersey, there was stress to be sure, occasional shortages of PPE. There might have been "triage" in the sense of directing patients to appropriate resources. There was no "triage" in the sense of denying care.

From NJ governor briefing, 6/1/2020, peak hospital usage was around April 14, 76% of acute care beds in use, 85% of ICU beds. Based on specific, local reporting, my local hospital had an additional 25% capacity above the nominal capacity by converting operating rooms. Every outpatient surgical suite and dentist office provided additional surge capacity. The hospital ship in NY harbor, which partly served NJ, was almost unused, and left in late April.

There is a NJ government web site hippocrates.nj.gov that provides real time information on hospitals on diversion, based on the nominal capacity, not the +25% surge capacity. Based on that web site, observed in April - May, there were a few hospitals intermittently at nominal capacity.

Recently, I have heard the same kind of scary stories out of Arizona. Arizona is recently at 85% to 90% of hospital capacity for a few weeks (actually improving last I checked). One supposes that the AZ folks can get surge capacity the same way we did in NJ.

So now the story out of Texas, I assume it is the same media scare tactics, because that's what moves copy, or captures eyeballs.

It is not much of a story to say that, we expect the curve in TX will be about the same as AZ, as it was in NJ, as it was in NY, as in Sweden, and Italy, and Spain, and UK. Check the different state government COVID dashboards and worldometer. We are smarter about treatment options, for example, not inadvertently killing people with ventilators when humidified oxygen will do.

It is possible that TX is big enough with communities separate enough that the disease progress could be distinct curves in different parts of the state. The overall curve for USA is more-or-less the composite of curves for smaller regions.

SlowAFRunnrMom wrote:

GWT wrote:

Yeah, it has nothing to do with Texas' inability to buy into the steps it takes to curb the disease, but I digress.

I've been all over Texas this summer and no one has seen overwhelmed hospitals except the valley area where this report is from. As a matter of fact, even the DFW/Houston areas where we supposedly had a surge in cases we still had plenty of empty beds. Don't get to thinking you know what's happening in Texas from one border city news article that has a bias.

I've literally only had 1 person I know that says they had covid and that person claimed their tests all came back negative. She says the dr told her that 2 negative tests meant nothing she had all the symptoms and should quarantine for 14 days.

Another Texan here, I'm not seeing what this article is reporting either. Even my nurse friends have told me the hospitals are even emptier than before. Texas is doing just fine

The Valley is Mexico with wal-mart and Burger King. The place is a hole all the homes have metal barriers over the windows and doors. The report of people spilling over the border for care shouldn't be surprising at all. They have had problems with anchor babies for years with illegal moms coming over the border to get care. This is another nothing article.

For what it is worth I would fire you wife and hire someone else but you she shouldn't get unemployment. Teachers want to get paid to do nothing.

I used to come here ALL THE TIME. I cant deal with the ignorance any more.

This website is now a disgusting, ignorant, one sided trash heap.

10min on the message boards and you KNOW the kind of people what inhabit this place. ProTrump frat boys.

And sadly its openly encouraged by the owners because THEY know who inhabit it and they need them.

Spilling over? Really? Because the borders been closed for months and its not exactly easy to get across any more. So one more bigoted LIE. Not anything unusual on this site

old_dead_people wrote:

The report of people spilling over the border for care shouldn't be surprising at all.

YEP! There are a few of us trying to fight the good fight but fringe right wing mouth breathers absolutely dominate. It's a sh!t filled toilet these boards. If we're lucky, the mouth breathers here will encourage each other to congregate and all come down with Corona (and anal warts and herpes).

Tommy2Nuttz wrote:

I used to come here ALL THE TIME. I cant deal with the ignorance any more.

This website is now a disgusting, ignorant, one sided trash heap.

10min on the message boards and you KNOW the kind of people what inhabit this place. ProTrump frat boys.

And sadly its openly encouraged by the owners because THEY know who inhabit it and they need them.

Tommy2Nuttz wrote:

Spilling over? Really?

Because the borders been closed for months and its not exactly easy to get across any more.

So one more bigoted LIE.

Not anything unusual on this site

old_dead_people wrote:

The report of people spilling over the border for care shouldn't be surprising at all.

People walk back and forth across the border every day. They work here and reside in Mexico (supposedly) and yes they use our hospitals to give birth. All. The. Time.