Texas Medical Center Removes ICU Capacity Data As COVID Cases Surge | Talking Points Memo

“Texas Medical Center Removes ICU Capacity Data…” in a late birthday homage to Stalin’s devotion to good news.

Of course you knew. This was for the younger readers.

Perfect. And if you need proper social distancing, just put each patient on the floor on opposite sides.

They are learning Soviet planning techniques from the source. Although Trump can’t do Soviet central planning any better than he can run a business.

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Since hospitalized patients already have their own masks with them, all is well. :slight_smile:

Oddly, amusement parks are still open under the previous opening guidelines. My son works at Six Flags over Texas. We are wondering how much longer they will stay open. Hopefully they actually get to “shut down” this time. Back in March they just abandoned the park, so there was a lot of cleanup of things like game prizes (sun-bleached stuffed animals that had been rained on repeatedly, for example) required to reopen last week.

Turns out that hospital ships are really helpful in areas without infrastructure or lacking personnel, their usual health missions. Many of the people in NYC ended up working in and with hospitals on the ground, the ship was superfluous.

Lesson learned, we’ve got plenty of infrastructure, and the ability to rapidly build wards in conference centers, stadiums and elsewhere. So instead of bringing a ship, you just send the people and supplies in.

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Dallas has a similar plan for Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center but hasn’t reactivated it so far.

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Bibleman™ will save them.

Similar to what I saw on yesterday’s dog food run here in Florida. The Catholic and Baptist parking lots were empty, but the Presbyterian lot were full up. It appears the Presbyterians don’t have good survival instincts.

ETA: Also, are they aware that there are already a bunch of Christian churches in San Antonio? Salvation is already at hand, no need for 30 dumbasses from wherever you are to save the locals from themselves.

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Houston/Harris County seems to have good compliance now that the County Judge was allowed to issue a new mask order. Before that, most people I saw in the grocery stores wore masks, but by no means all — maybe 3/4s. Practically no one in bars or dine-in restaurants were wearing them.

100% of folks I’ve seen in the TMC over the last 3 months wear masks. At all of the Houston Methodist buildings, they take temps and quiz on exposure for anyone who enters, require wrist bands to prove you’ve been screened, limit visitors, and of course require masks.

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Houston here, and I assure you that most of us already know. I am hearing unrest even from my Republican friends lately (welcome to the party, pal).

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Boy, that Susan Sarandon Golden Revolution is going like gangbusters, ain’t it?

Just think what a shithole this country would have devolved into if that email-hoarding, Wall Street speech-giving, DNC-controlled bitch Hitlery Fucking Clinton had been elected!

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I trust the TMC website and facilities. There’s no benefit in it to any of them to hide or fudge the numbers — they’re the people who have to deal with the consequences.

The TMC organization itself is a long-standing non-profit, not a government group, consisting of the various health care groups with facilities there and coordinates the TMC as a whole. Those groups include Houston Methodist, UT Medical, Baylor St. Luke’s, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Memorial Hermann, Texas Children’s, and others. They were the first to take serious precautions and shut down facilities when the pandemic began and the first to sound the alarm about the rise in cases in this area beginning several weeks ago.

I’ll be at the TMC, at one of Houston Methodist’s towers*, this afternoon. I’ll let you know if anything looks noticeably different from last week.

*Yes, I said one of its towers. In the TMC, Houston Methodist has, IIRC, six high-rise towers, plus the hospital itself, and a research institute. And those are just the facilities in the Med Center-proper.

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Texas data available:

I was wondering where the Judge came in. But can she do that without dumbass legal challenges?

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Same procedures at UTSW in Dallas. Wife did two weeks there for transplant rejection/infection right at the end of March/early April. The only bad part was we entered through the ER because she had a fever and cough, and then she had to spend two nights on the “Covid Knock Out” floor under pandemic-level restrictions while they ran through two PCR tests for C-19 to then move to the usual transplant floor once cleared. With non-elective surgery cancelled back then, the hospital was a ghost-town, I expect its like that again now (although we are supposed to be going there tomorrow for a short procedure to take out her central line…we can’t seem to find out if that’s still a “go” yet).

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You mean, like the idiot MD who keeps suing everyone for violating his “rights” by doing contact tracing and requiring masks? Yeah, he and his idiot followers will probably sue — again.

In Maryland, Catholic Churches have partially reopened, but the Archdiocesan guidelines include a limit on the total # of attendees, masks mandatory, 6 feet spacing minimum between people from different households, singing banned except for the cantor, only church staff performing music, readings, etc (instead of lay ministers/volunteers), no handshakes, no shared wine, and communion is distributed as people leave the service (in a distanced line) with the bread placed on the person’s palm and not in their mouths. And railings, etc, are sanitized between services and the entire church sanitized at least once a week.

Most importantly, the Archdiocese fully supports on-line streaming of services and, for the undefined future, has dropped the requirement that “Keeping holy the Lord’s day” means attending services in person.

So, die-hard conservatives can attend in person, while the majority can still participate on-line.

The cafeteria starts serving soylent green.

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I’m at Memorial and 610. On a clear day-- can almost see them from here. :sunglasses:

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