During the latest COVID-19 surge in Texas, Lubbock’s region was one of the first to reach a high hospitalization rate set by the state. Forty-five days later, the 22-county region is still above that mark and others are inching up there.
That’s a concern for Lubbock hospital administrators, who are currently relying on the hundreds of traveling healthcare workers filling gaps in local staffing. If statewide trends continue, those caregivers could be relocated.
“You can find real estate somewhere if you have the right equipment. But staffing is everything,” Mark Funderburk, president and CEO of University Health System, said at a Wednesday news conference. “And if the 126 [workers], I have from the state, and I’m grateful for every one of them, if that were to be lessened or redeployed somewhere else, that is the big, big, big issue.”
Funderburk said he doesn’t want the city to get to the point where the federal government needs to intervene. He said he’s going to be tenacious about keeping those nurses and doctors in Lubbock.
With the state’s help, facilities in the regional medical hub for West Texas are diverting patients of all kinds to other states, at least in one case as far away as Illinois.
Funderburk says they accepted 13 regional patients Tuesday but denied 29. He says most of those patients are from rural areas where healthcare options are few and far between.
“We are in bit of a balancing act every single day on who is accepted, who’s denied, trying to put as many people in the system as possible” Funderburk said.
Walt Cathey, CEO of the Lubbock Market for Covenant Health, said the coronavirus is blanketing the area right now — no community has been spared. Just this week, there were requests for patient transfers from Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado.
“We’re fighting this, not just for our region, but for a lot of other regions,” Cathey said.
“The patients aren’t going to stop coming,” he added. “We have to have a plan to figure out some other resource options as well.”
On Wednesday, over 15% of patients tested positive for the novel coronavirus in 11 of the 26 trauma service regions in the state. Gov. Greg Abbott has set this as a threshold for additional COVID-19 mitigation measures. If a hospital region is above that 15% line for more than seven days, non-essential businesses are expected to go back to 50% maximum capacity and bars should close.
Local medical and government leaders have repeatedly said this is an arbitrary data point that doesn’t well reflect the reality of a community’s COVID-19 situation.
The Lubbock, Amarillo and El Paso regions have been over this threshold for well over a month. The Permian Basin, Waco and Laredo areas hit this mark more recently, according to data from the Texas Department of State Health Services. Regions that include Dallas, Texarkana, Tyler and San Angelo haven’t hit the seven-day streak yet, but have had a COVID-19 hospitalization rate above 15% for several days.
“It’s not a Panhandle and far West Texas issue,” Lubbock Mayor Dan Pope said. “It’s going on around the state and I think that even intensifies our need to solve the problem. Because we can’t send our patients anywhere else nor can we receive patients from other parts of the state or surrounding states.”
As of Wednesday, 325 people are hospitalized in Lubbock with COVID-19. Both of the city’s hospital systems report no available beds. Statewide, over 9,100 people are hospitalized with the virus.
Have a news tip? Email Sarah Self-Walbrick at saselfwa@ttu.edu. Follow her reporting on Twitter @SarahFromTTUPM.
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