Texas ER doctor on surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations: It's terrifying
Dr. Natasha Kathuria shares the real story about what's happening at Texas hospitals as military medical personnel deploy to the state.
Texas emergency rooms and intensive care units are "bulging at the seams," bombarded by a tsunami of new coronavirus cases, Dr. Natasha Kathuria reported Tuesday.
In an interview on "Fox & Friends" with host Brian Kilmeade, Kathuria said cities all over the Lonestar State are feeling the pressure.
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"So, it's been very terrifying. Even the patients [who] come in for non-COVID related things – like a trauma patient, for example – we end up finding out that they have COVID while they are in the ER. And so, things get very, very hectic at that point because these are infectious, communicable diseases that we very much worry about," she explained.
People wait in line at a free COVID-19 testing site provided by United Memorial Medical Center, at the Mexican Consulate, Sunday, June 28, 2020, in Houston. Confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Texas continue to surge. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, on Friday, shut down bars again and scaled back restaurant dining as cases climbed to record levels after the state embarked on one of America's fastest reopenings. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
Kathuria works in Austin, Houston and New Braunfels – a city near San Antonio – but noted things in Houston are "pretty bad" as they contort to manage bed limitations.
"You know, they’re trying to shift patients between hospitals to make room. They have to keep these patients in certain areas. They can't just admit a COVID-positive patient anywhere," she said. "So, it's been very difficult. I mean, they are even having to use a children's hospital for backup for adult patients. I mean, that's pretty remarkable. That's a red flag."
According to data from Texas Health and Human Services, there have been over 264,300 cases reported with more than 3,200 deaths. On Monday, state health officials reported more than 40 new fatalities and 5,600 new cases following what had been the state's deadliest week.
Kathuria said that their handling of the virus has shifted as physicians learned more about COVID-19 and that they're doing a better job at "getting more patients across the finish line."
"But, what we're worried about right now is the collateral damage," she said. "When you overwhelm a health care system with anything – especially an infectious disease like we are right now – you don't just worry about the patients dying from COVID. Then it's patients dying of completely otherwise preventable causes of death. You know, appendicitis, heart attacks, strokes – everything gets affected when a health care system is overwhelmed."
While there are backup plans "in place" to mitigate worrying increases, doctors like Kathuria are tirelessly working to make sure their cities don't get to a point where they'd move outside hospitals.
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"As you can imagine, you don't have access to everything else the hospital has: the radiology, the blood work, everything else gets transferred," she said. " So, we’re really working on personnel right now: health care workers, front line nurses, respiratory therapists. That’s really what our manpower is. Our physician staffing is OK right now. But, that's teetering; we’ll see how that goes."
"But, it's really the nurses and the respiratory therapists. We are also surge staffing from around the state. So, we’ll see how much we can handle before this blows out of control," she concluded.