Texas Replaces NYC As The New Hotspot

A 30-year old man who attended a COVID party in San Antonio has died from the disease. Before he died, he told doctors that he thought the virus was a hoax and intended to prove it with the party. He reportedly concluded, “I made a mistake.” Bexar County, where San Antonio is has about 19-20,000 confirmed COVID cases and is seeing about 1000 new cases a day. Most cases are in people aged 20-39.

Elsewhere, in Harris County Texas, Houston hospitals are full and ICUs are overwhelmed requiring COVID patients to wait in ERs for a bed. Because of this, Houston hospitals are also increasingly diverting ambulances to other regional hospitals, which also affects non-COVID patients, such as those with cardiovascular emergencies. There has been a spike in at-home deaths from cardiac arrest in the county, which could be directly from COVID disease or from delayed medical attention to non-COVID patients.

During an eight-day period in late June and early July, Houston’s 12 busiest emergency departments hit a maximum capacity three times, in contrast to zero times in the same period a year earlier. And when a hospital does have beds available, they sometimes do not have the staff to manage those patients, due to COVID-related absences.

On June 24, several hospital executives affiliated with the Texas Medical Center — a sprawling medical campus that’s home to most of Houston’s major hospital systems — issued a warning that COVID-19 hospitalizations were growing at an “alarming rate” and could soon put an unsustainable strain on hospital resources. They were right.

The mortality rate from COVID is decreasing, but the number of people getting very ill is increasing. That is likely because the virus is running rampant in younger people who flaunt social isolation. What they don’t realize is that many infected young people will have long lasting health problems as previously reported in these pages.

It is noteworthy that Texas was one of the first states to open back up.