Maintaining adequate staffing has been a key challenge, with hundreds of local medical professionals out sick or in quarantine. Managers are offering bonuses to nurses, attempting to hire new ones, and
A color-coded designation that signals to ambulance crews which hospitals are busiest and should be avoided has lost its meaning now that most hospitals are operating well beyond their typical capacity. For emergency departments and intensive care units, “It’s pretty much been entirely reading ‘saturation’ in red for weeks now,” said Dr. David Persse, medical director of the Houston Fire Department. “Our local rule that everybody knows is that when everybody’s closed, everybody’s open.”
Two public hospitals that serve as a safety net for Houston-area patients who are uninsured and those with Medicaid have been particularly hard pressed. “The only way they’ve maintained any semblance of sanity is we basically transfer patients as soon as we receive them,” after stabilizing and assessing them, said Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, chief executive of the Harris Health System, the public system. “As soon as a bed becomes empty, someone rolls up from the emergency room.”
Florida has recorded more than 269,800 cases, with more than 4,200total deaths, according to a New York Times database. There were also single-day records on Sunday in the counties that include Florida’s largest cities, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Fort Myers, West Palm Beach, Pensacola and Sarasota.