Rural parts of the Lone Star State are facing a shortage of hospital beds, creating a perilous situation for small-town Texans who contract Covid-19.
MARFA, Texas (CN) – In the rural Big Bend region of Far West Texas, there have been signs lately of life returning to some kind of normalcy despite the coronavirus pandemic’s resurgence here and across the country.
Tourists are once again flocking to the region’s friendly small towns for a breath of fresh, high-desert air, campsites are filled with travelers and locals alike seeking a break from the monotony of work-from-home routines and Netflix binges.
But with local virus cases surging beyond their previous peaks in the summer and early fall and the region’s closest major hospitals overwhelmed by an influx of Covid-19 patients, some are warning residents here and in other rural parts of Texas of a newly heightened risk that may at first sound unthinkable in the world’s richest nation: If you get deathly sick with Covid-19, it might be hard to find a hospital bed.
“I’m hearing stories out of Lubbock and Amarillo that they were actually transferring patients to Arizona, Denver and Kansas City,” John Henderson, president of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, said in an interview. “Our rural hospitals in northwest Texas and West Texas are desperate to find accepting urban hospitals, and they just can’t do it.”
Since the pandemic began, public health experts have warned that people in rural areas with small hospitals – or no hospitals at all – could face particularly risky situations if they get sick with Covid-19, as small-town facilities may not have the equipment or expertise to sufficiently battle the disease.
As larger hospitals in places like El Paso, Lubbock and the twin oilfield cities of Midland and Odessa struggle with surges in Covid-19 patients, that warning has become a reality.
“This past weekend, we actually called 27 hospitals in four states to get one [Covid] patient transferred out,” said Holly Holcomb, chief operating officer of the 39-bed Childress Regional Medical Center in Childress, Texas, a Panhandle town of about 6,000 people.
Holcomb said her team did eventually find a bed for that patient at a larger facility, where she was promptly put on a ventilator. But it took persistence.
“We’re to the point where we’re having to reach out for personal favors to physicians in the area, calling their cellphones, saying, ‘please help us save this person, here’s a picture of who we’re trying to save, can you help us secure a bed,’” Holcomb said.
Others, and not just Covid-19 patients, haven’t been so lucky. Holcomb told of a 54-year-old man who recently came to the hospital after his gallbladder burst and needed to be transferred out. They couldn’t find a bed for him.
“He actually died in our ER while waiting for someone to take him,” she said. “In this day and age, for somebody to die of a ruptured gallbladder.”
The bigger hospitals insist they do everything they can to make room for patients who need to be brought in from smaller facilities – waiting lists for transfers are ticked through as soon as beds open up – but some say the strain from local influxes of Covid-19 patients has kept their doors virtually closed to transfers from farther away towns.
“We’re turning down requests every day, and people are having to go farther and farther, mostly to the east, to find the place that will take them,” Russell Meyers, CEO of Midland Memorial Hospital, said during a Thursday news briefing. “We opened yesterday for two minutes, and in the course of that two minutes we accepted two patients, and then we closed again.”
