At Mayor Turner’s press conference this afternoon, Houston Health Director Dr. David Perrse says the Houston hospital system is holding up to the strain. “They’ve told us for now, for the moment, there remains capacity in the hospitals. Today if somebody is ill there is a hospital bed available for them. But we all need to work hard to make sure we don’t overwhelm the hospital system,” he said.There are plans to expand the healthcare system, Turner said, as reviews of shuttered properties are being conducted to see if they could be utilized.
The mayor said the city has leased two hotels to house quarantined individuals, including first responders, with 186 rooms, on a three-month agreement.The city and county are sharing a third hotel where first responders are being housed and will finalize the arrangement next week.
Turner says people are still congregating in unsafe numbers at the city’s park basketball courts, and has called on the city Parks & Rec to remove rims and goals to encourage safer social distancing.
Turner and Perrse both stressed that there will dramatic swings in the number of reported positive Coronavirus tests going forward owing largely to the way results are coming in from the labs, those contracted by the federal government returning results within days and private labs taking sometimes weeks.