A Texas hospital is so overrun with coronavirus cases it will send the patients least likely to survive home to die
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that Dr. Jose Vasquez, the health authority for Starr County, said the county is creating guidelines to help health workers decide how to use resources on patients with the best chance of survival.
Vasquez added that a committee will decide which patients are most likely to die at Starr County Memorial Hospital, the only hospital in the county, and will send them home.
"The situation is desperate," he said Tuesday. "We cannot continue functioning in the Starr County Memorial Hospital nor in our county in the way that things are going. The numbers are staggering."
Vasquez said that the county sends coronavirus patients daily to other parts of Texas and to other states, but that hospitals in both Texas and nearby states are now overwhelmed.
"There is nowhere to put these patients. The whole state of Texas and neighboring states have no ICU beds to spare for us," he said, according to Border Report.
The decision is reminiscent of the decisions made by doctors in Italy in March, when the country was being ravaged by the virus. and they said they had to choose who to save due to limited resources. Italy has since brought its outbreak under control.
Texas has become a coronavirus hotspot in recent weeks, with more than 331,000 cases and more than 4,700 deaths recorded.
Vasquez said that "We are going to have these committees reviewing each case."
He added that, for some patients, "we believe they will be better taken care in the love of their own family and home rather than thousands of miles away dying alone," CBS News reported.
Starr County had successfully fought the coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic.
But Vasquez noted that cases started to increase "in an exponential and alarming way" when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott decided to reopen the state from late April, according to CBS News.
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