Two prominent Texas mayors warned that their cities’ hospitals will be “overwhelmed” by the Covid-19 cases within two weeks, even as Donald Trump continues to portray the resurgence of the coronavirus across the country as the embers of a fire that it is constantly extinguishing.
“If we don’t get this virus under control quickly, in about two weeks our hospital system could be in serious trouble,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said Sunday, the last day of a July 4 holiday weekend during which Los Experts fear that many Americans ignore public health guidelines.
“I mean, overwhelmed. At this time we have bed capacity. But let me tell you, the biggest problem [is] Staffing. We can always provide additional beds, but we need people, nurses, and all the other medical professionals to take care of those beds. That’s the critical point right now. “
Turner’s comments, for CBS’s Face the Nation, came as hospitalization and Covid-19 positivity rates rose in his city.
Texas, along with Arizona and Florida, has become an entry point for the infection, registering six consecutive days of new confirmed cases of over 5,000. On Saturday, he set a record of 8,258 cases and 7,890 hospitalizations.
“A month ago, one in 10 people tested positive,” said Turner, a Democrat. “Today it is one in four. The number of people who get sick and go to hospitals has increased exponentially. The number of people in our [intensive care] the beds have increased exponentially. “
According to Johns Hopkins University researchers, the United States has confirmed nearly 2.9 million coronavirus cases and almost 130,000 deaths. The states that were the first hotspots, New York prominent among them, are pausing or proceeding cautiously with plans to reopen.
At the White House on Saturday, Trump tried to minimize the resurgence of the virus, claiming without evidence that the infection was “99% harmless.”
“Our strategy is progressing well,” he said. “It goes off in one area, it raises its ugly face in another area. But we have learned a lot. We have learned to put out the flame. “
The president’s words angered Steve Adler, the Democrat mayor of Austin.
“I understand that you have a difficult job, but it is dangerous not to send a clear message to the Americans, to the people of my city,” he told CNN’s State of the Union.
“We have the weekend of July 4th and we need everyone to wear masks. And when they start to hear that kind of ambiguous message coming out of Washington, there are more and more people who don’t wear masks, who don’t go the social distance, who won’t do whatever it takes to keep a community safe.
“And that’s wrong, and it’s dangerous. I just have to hope that people are not going to hear that and focus on what they are hearing here more locally. ”
Hospitals in Austin, Adler said, were facing a crisis almost identical to that of Houston.
“Behavior in our city started to change about two weeks ago,” he said. “If we don’t change the trajectory, I am within two weeks of the invasion of our hospitals. And in our ICUs, it could be 10 days from that. “
Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, implemented a mask mandate across the state last week, a move Adler said he welcomed but wished had come sooner. On Sunday, Abbott’s office said more than 400 cases of remdesivir of antiviral drugs had been distributed to 157 hospitals and 600 medical teams and 16 ventilators had been deployed to areas of greatest need in South Texas.
Elsewhere during the holiday weekend, pressure on the hospital space increased. Florida, where the beaches of southeast Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties were closed to deter large gatherings, recorded 10,059 new cases on Sunday, surpassing the state’s 200,000 cases just two weeks after it hit 100,000.
Four of the 11 hospitals in Pinellas County had run out of intensive care beds on Sunday, according to the Florida health care administration agency, after weeks of warnings that hospital space across the state was shrinking.
In Miami-Dade County, which implemented its own mask requirement after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis resisted growing requests for a state mandate, more patients (138) were admitted to the hospital than released (125 ). The total inpatient count of 1,538 is almost double the count of 776 on June 22.
“It is clear that growth is exponential right now,” Francis Suarez, the Republican mayor of Miami, told ABC This Week. “You know we’ve been beating record after record after record, all the past few weeks.
“The city of Miami was the last city in the entire state of Florida to open. They criticized me for waiting so long. But there is no doubt that when we reopened, people began to socialize as if the virus did not exist. “
Arizona reported 3,536 new cases Sunday, an increase from 841 the previous day.
“We open too early in Arizona,” Kate ABC, Democrat mayor of Phoenix, told ABC. “We were one of the last states to stay home and one of the first to resurface.”
