Coronavirus-Fighting Federal Resources Headed For Houston

HOUSTON, TX — The governor late Friday said additional federal resources have been secured to help fight the coronavirus scourge in the Houston region.

In an advisory issued Friday evening, Gov. Greg Abbott said availability of resources are the culmination of talks with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and other members of the White House. The secured resources are designed to ensure the medical needs of Texans, the governor said.

Among the resources are an Urban Area Medical Task Force from the U.S. Department of Defense expected to arrive in the region on Monday and a Disaster Medical Assistance Team from U.S. Health and Human Services that has just been deployed, Abbott said.

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The resources add to a Department of Defense Urban Area Medical Task Force that recently starting working in Bexar County as well as seven federal assessment teams operating in Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, McAllen, Laredo and El Paso this past week. Abbott noted he continues daily collaboration with the state's federal partners to expand resources for any regions to respond to COVID-19.

“Texas is grateful to the federal government as well as the president and vice resident for working swiftly to provide additional resources to the state as we work to mitigate COVID-19 and care for our fellow Texans,” Abbott said in a prepared statement. “We will continue to work with our local and federal partners to ensure all resources and needs are met throughout the state.”

The move comes after a week of Abbott telling various media outlets during interviews that the coming week will be worse than the current one in Texas — a week that in itself saw records being broken daily, including a record 10,002 new hospital admissions statewide on Friday, a new single-day high of 98 new deaths on Wednesday and an all-time high of 10,028 new cases on Tuesday.

Amid the illness scourge, Houston has emerged as a coronavirus hotbed. As tabulated on the Texas Department of State Health Service statistical dashboard on Friday, Harris County has had 40,919 total confirmed cases since the onset of illness. Dallas County comes in a distant second, with 30,361 historical cases. All told, 436 people have died of the respiratory illness in the Houston area, 13 more than in Dallas County as seen on the dashboard.

Beyond the dizzying abstraction of statistics, a ground level view offers a decidedly simpler assessment of the scale of the scourge. As NBC News and ProPublica reported on Friday, hospitals have run out of intensive care beds amid an unrelenting influx of coronavirus-positive patients. Hundreds of patients are now being treated in emergency rooms given the dearth of ICU beds — sometimes for several hours or multiple days, according to the report.

On Thursday, according to the report, hospital admissions hit a new record when 3,812 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the Houston area, including more than 1,000 in intensive care units.

“All the hospitals are full,” Dr. Jamie McCarthy, an executive vice president at Memorial Hermann Health System and an emergency room physician, is quoted as saying in the report. “All the hospitals in the city are boarding patients. We are expanding capacity, but we can’t turn those on immediately. It requires staffing. It requires nurses and doctors to come in. And so, as we’ve continued to expand our inpatient capacity, we’re just keeping up with the volume that’s coming in.”

Texas has seen ever-growing rates of respiratory illness since Abbott led an aggressive reopening of a coronavirus-stalled state economy launched in phases on May 1. Texas became the second state to reopen its economy amid the doldrums of illness, one week after Georgia launched a similar effort. Texas has seen exponential increases in illness ever since, casting the state as something of a cautionary tale about the perils of opening back up too soon.