COVID-19’s surge in Texas prompted Texas Governor Greg Abbott to pause the reopening process and resume an elective surgery ban in an attempt to reserve hospital space for those suffering from COVID-19.
Texas’s elective surgery ban targets and initially affected only four counties, which, it turns out, are also the four most populous cities in the state, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin. It does not yet include neighboring counties that encompass suburban or neighboring cities, such as Fort Worth. The ban was expanded on June 30 to include four additional counties in South Texas for the cities of Corpus Christi, Brownsville, McAllen, and Laredo.
OTW spoke to a couple of surgeons from the Texas Back Institute (TBI), which has an affected facility in the city of Dallas, as well as other locations in the Dallas area to get a sense for how the ban is affecting their operations.
Jack Zigler, M.D. talked about the earlier ban that was initially lifted in May, indicating that TBI still had a backlog of cases. During the first ban some patients showed progression and more severe symptoms, such as bowel or bladder control issues, and were brought in for emergency surgery. TBI made an effort to reduce the risk to patients and staff by implementing many social distancing and personal protective equipment requirements. Telemedicine was used extensively to continually monitor patients whose procedures had been postponed. The latest ban affects only the Dallas location, and TBI surgeons with cases scheduled in Dallas hospitals are working to reschedule procedures in Plano and Frisco, according to Zigler.
Zigler is hopeful that “more appropriate restraint by the public, and better adherence to social distancing and masking, along with less unnecessary gathering, that there will be a decrease in hospitalizations and an increase in reserve capacity,” will lead a reduction in new cases and lifting of the ban. Hopefully, the announcements made by Governor Abbott will bring attention to the rising number of cases. Over the past few weeks several states have issued mandatory mask orders to help bring attention to the importance of wearing a mask to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The issue has become political with pushback in many areas.
