Hospitals may run out of beds by late April if Gov. Abbott doesn’t order Texans to stay at home, hospital group warns

Dallas-area hospitals are pressuring Gov. Greg Abbott to order residents to stay at home and warning a surge of patients sick with the new coronavirus could deplete their bed capacity by late April, according to an email from a Dallas-area hospital association obtained by The Dallas Morning News.

But Abbott, saying that the outbreak is concentrated in the state’s urban centers, indicated Sunday that he wanted to take other steps first before imposing stricter standards statewide that would impact rural areas still unaffected by the virus.

The chilling warning, based on one projection the association included in the email sent Saturday, illustrates how quickly Texas hospitals could be overrun by the spread of the new coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19.

“We need your help,” Steve Love, president and CEO of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council wrote in an email Saturday urging his members to pressure the governor to impose a shelter in place order. “Thank you for your immediate action as we want the governor to take this urgent action statewide rather than individual counties or cities.”

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Love’s email, coupled with additional letters sent this weekend from mayors, health care executives, school leaders and business owners in the Dallas area, represents the latest effort to pressure the governor for stricter restrictions to combat the virus’s spread.

As of Sunday, there have been nearly 600 positive cases of COVID-19 in Texas, based on The News’ database of reported cases.

Abbott said Sunday, however, he needs to measure the effectiveness of his recent executive order that temporarily closed schools and banned large crowds before enacting stricter steps.

President Donald Trump defended Abbott on Sunday night, when asked at a White House briefing if he is comfortable with Texas holding off on a stay-at-home order despite warnings from hospitals of dire consequences within weeks.

“He’s a great governor, and he knows what he’s doing. A lot of the areas that he’s talking about, a lot of the counties he’s talking about are not very strongly affected,” Trump said. “. ..I have total confidence in Gov. Greg Abbott.”

Pressed as to whether the lack of uniform restrictions among states and within states is acceptable, Trump said it is.

“Every state’s different. Idaho, West Virginia, Iowa, Nebraska, are much different than New York, than California — Los Angeles as an example or San Francisco,” he said, noting that current hot spots for the outbreak are in Washington state, California and New York. “That’s the hot spot like no other hot spot.”

Still, to expand hospital bed capacity, Abbott ordered health care facilities postpone nonessential procedures and suspended certain regulations to let hospitals treat more than one patient in each room. The measure directs dentists as well as doctors to delay for a month “all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately medically necessary” to preserve a patient’s life or avoid “adverse medical consequences.”

“Together these orders will free up countless hospital beds across the entire state of Texas to be able to treat the potential increase in COVID-19 patients,” Abbott said in a press conference at the Capitol.

Abbott’s current executive order — which took effect over the weekend — bans “social gatherings” larger than 10 people and closes certain businesses such as bars and gyms, but allows other offices to remain open.

Under California’s stay-at-home order, only business sectors identified as essential — such as health care, energy, financial services, food and agriculture — can continue having employees show up at work.

The hospital council suggested in a graphic it attached in its email that if nothing changes more than 200,000 Texans will be hospitalized by the middle of May — far outpacing some 50,000 beds available. However, if Abbott immediately adopts a shelter ordinance similar to California’s, the number of people needing hospital care would be drastically reduced to the low thousands, according to a projection included in Love’s email.