Monday, June 29, 2020

Houston Hospital Boss Shatters Media's COVID Fearmongering: "Only About 3 Or 4 More People In ICU"

Houston Methodist CEO Dr. Marc Boom told CNBC on Monday that the demographics of the outbreak have "Flipped" and that the mostly-younger people arriving in the state's hospitals often don't require ICU beds, even though many do get very sick.

"Even though we have about 200 more patients in house, about double, we only have about three or four more people in the ICU, so that's encouraging."

As CNBC reports, Boom says Houston Methodist has the necessary capacity to handle the Covid-19 outbreak, echoing similar comments on CNBC Friday from Dr. David Callender, CEO of Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston.

"We do have the capacity to care for many more patients, and have lots of fluidity and ability to manage," Boom said.

He pointed out that his hospital one year ago was at 95% ICU capacity, similar to the numbers the hospital is seeing today.

"The TMC issued a serious statement about ICU capacity that unnecessarily alarmed our community, making it inaccurately appear that hospitals are in an imminent ICU capacity crisis. The letter was released prematurely Wednesday and it had unintended consequences."

Finally, Texas Children's Hospital CEO Mark Wallace added that his facility has "a lot of capacity."

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