Houston hospitals claiming full capacity suspiciously stop reporting data

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Texas Medical Center hospitals stopped updating key metrics showing the stress rising numbers of COVID-19 patients were placing on their facilities for more than three days, rattling policymakers and residents who have relied on the information to gauge the spread of the coronavirus.

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The institutions — which together constitute the world’s largest medical complex — reported Thursday that their base intensive care capacity had hit 100 percent for the first time during the pandemic and was on pace to exceed an “unsustainable surge capacity” of intensive care beds by July 6.

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Then, after reporting numerous charts and graphs almost daily for three months, the organization posted no updates until around 9 p.m. Saturday, sowing confusion about the hospitals’ ability to withstand a massive spike in cases that has followed Gov. Greg Abbott’s May decisions to lift restrictions intended to slow the virus.

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When the charts reappeared, eight of the 17 original slides had been deleted — including any reference to hospital capacity or projections of future capacity. The TMC later called that update “incomplete.”

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Houston Methodist CEO Dr. Marc Boom stressed that the new data was not reinvented — all the figures and projection models are the same — but was simply reformatted in an effort to make clear that reaching 100 percent of capacity in an ICU is a moving target. TMC hospitals have a combined 373 beds, for instance, that can become ICU beds with a “challenging” but “doable” amount of effort, Boom said, with the reassignment of trained staff and equipment.

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Doing so would take the TMC facilities’ combined 93 percent ICU capacity as of the Sunday report down to 72 percent, the chart shows.

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“This is just trying to be clear. We want to be as helpful as we possibly can,” Boom said. “Obviously, this got delayed a couple days because it’s complicated — you put 11 or so institutions together all trying to figure out something this complicated and trying to figure out how we express it a little bit more accurately — it took a while, a little longer than any of us would have liked, but simply because it’s complicated. I like what we came up with.”

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The changes capped a week dominated by concerns over hospital capacity.

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“The governor’s office believes all hospitals should be reporting accurate data to the state and to the public as often as possible,” Wittman said Sunday morning. “We demanded more information to share, not less.”

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