(Bloomberg) -- Houston's Covid-19 outbreak is accelerating at an exponential pace that will swamp the fourth-largest U.S. city's medical infrastructure by the Independence Day holiday, less than two weeks away, a leading disease specialist warned.
Even as Houston-area intensive-care wards approach full capacity, the worst is yet to come because of “the huge amount of transmission going on in our community,” Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said in an interview Thursday.
Current trends in Harris County, which includes Houston, indicate the caseload will triple or quadruple by mid-July, Hotez said, citing modeling by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's PolicyLab. Such a scenario would be “apocalyptic,” he said. “We can't go there.”
Hotez's remarks came a day after the Texas Medical Center warned the Houston region's intensive-care capacity was quickly filling up and would soon force medical authorities to convert other facilities to ad hoc Covid-19 wards. Harris County officials said they are prepared to reopen a field hospital at a professional football stadium if so-called surge capacity shows signs of strain.
The trajectory of new cases is “going vertical,” Hotez said. “That's what epidemic diseases classically do.”
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