[fullmetal]

The data in the ER speaks to the lack of ICU capacity to receive patients admitted from the ER to the ICU.  If there are a ton of ER patients, it's usually because there's not enough ICU staff or bed capacity to receive those patients.  There are definitely staffing issues at play that aren't reflected in the TMC public data (which only talks about bed capacity).

Specifically, the title of the article is: "'All the hospitals are full': In Houston, overwhelmed ICUs leave COVID-19 patients waiting in ER."

Houston hospitals have been forced to treat hundreds of COVID-19 patients in their emergency rooms — sometimes for several hours or multiple days — as they scramble to open additional intensive care beds for the wave of seriously ill people streaming through their doors, according to internal numbers shared with NBC News and ProPublica.

“Normally that patient would just go to an ICU bed, but because there are no beds available, they continue to board in the emergency room,” said Harris Health System president and CEO Esmaeil Porsa, who oversees the city’s two public safety-net hospitals. “It is not an optimal level of care. This is not something we would choose to do. The only reason this is happening is because we are being forced to do it.”

Dr. Jamie McCarthy, an executive vice president at Memorial Hermann Health System and an emergency room physician, acknowledged that the coronavirus crisis has forced his teams to hold more patients in ERs.

“All the hospitals are full,” McCarthy said. “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.”

While Houston’s top hospital executives have repeatedly said they can add hundreds of new intensive care beds to meet the demand, at least for the next couple of weeks, the number of patients being treated in emergency rooms demonstrates the difficulty of executing those plans in the midst of a rapidly growing crisis, officials say.

“Those things are not like a switch-key type of activity,” said Porsa, the Harris Health System CEO, noting that his hospitals have had to send patients to hospitals outside of Houston to make room. “The bottleneck to do that is really staffing. As you can imagine, ICU nurses are not a dime a dozen. They are very hard to come by, and it takes time to actually be able to do that.”

[fullmetal]

The data in the ER speaks to the lack of ICU capacity to receive patients admitted from the ER to the ICU.  If there are a ton of ER patients, it's usually because there's not enough ICU staff or bed capacity to receive those patients.  There are definitely staffing issues at play that aren't reflected in the TMC public data (which only talks about bed capacity).

Specifically, the title of the article is: "'All the hospitals are full': In Houston, overwhelmed ICUs leave COVID-19 patients waiting in ER."

Houston hospitals have been forced to treat hundreds of COVID-19 patients in their emergency rooms — sometimes for several hours or multiple days — as they scramble to open additional intensive care beds for the wave of seriously ill people streaming through their doors, according to internal numbers shared with NBC News and ProPublica.

“Normally that patient would just go to an ICU bed, but because there are no beds available, they continue to board in the emergency room,” said Harris Health System president and CEO Esmaeil Porsa, who oversees the city’s two public safety-net hospitals. “It is not an optimal level of care. This is not something we would choose to do. The only reason this is happening is because we are being forced to do it.”

Dr. Jamie McCarthy, an executive vice president at Memorial Hermann Health System and an emergency room physician, acknowledged that the coronavirus crisis has forced his teams to hold more patients in ERs.

“All the hospitals are full,” McCarthy said. “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.”

While Houston’s top hospital executives have repeatedly said they can add hundreds of new intensive care beds to meet the demand, at least for the next couple of weeks, the number of patients being treated in emergency rooms demonstrates the difficulty of executing those plans in the midst of a rapidly growing crisis, officials say.

“Those things are not like a switch-key type of activity,” said Porsa, the Harris Health System CEO, noting that his hospitals have had to send patients to hospitals outside of Houston to make room. “The bottleneck to do that is really staffing. As you can imagine, ICU nurses are not a dime a dozen. They are very hard to come by, and it takes time to actually be able to do that.”