Baby girl with seizures airlifted 150 miles due to bed shortage at Houston hospital

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The child tested positive for Covid-19, according to Amanda Callaway, spokesperson for Harris Health System. Callaway said the girl was having seizures and needed to be intubated, but Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital, where she was first taken, does not offer pediatric services.

None of the region’s major pediatric hospitals had beds available, Callaway said.

The baby is seen in a video posted by Harris Health being gently lifted into an air ambulance Thursday morning for a flight to a hospital in Temple, Texas, about 150 miles away.

Overall, Harris Health System has seen a huge increase in the number of Covid-19 patients, and at least half of intensive care patients have the virus, Callaway said.

“Add that in with normal emergency needs and it overwhelms the system,” Callaway told CNN.

Harris Health is part of Texas Medical Center, the largest in the world, according to its website. There were 336 Covid-19 patients admitted on Thursday, the highest daily number of admissions since February, according to its latest update.

Florida and Texas have accounted for a third of all Covid-19 cases in the United States reported in the past week, said White House Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients.

The cases are mostly found in areas where vaccination rates remain low, Zients said in a briefing on Monday.

The surge comes as the highly contagious Delta variant spreads and the percentage of Americans who are fully vaccinated hover around 49.9%, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hospitals are filling up again with patients as the virus ravages the unvaccinated population.

“We are back beyond our pre-pandemic volumes at LBJ,” said hospital administrator Patricia Darnauer KTRK, subsidiary of CNN.
the Harris County / City of Houston Public Health Dashboard As of Friday, 220.79 new cases per 100,000 people were reported over seven days.
In Texas, the seven-day moving average was 11,042 new daily cases on Monday, according to a CNN Analysis of Johns Hopkins University Data.

Gov. Greg Abbott has said he will not impose a statewide mask mandate and has previously banned local government entities from requiring vaccines.

Texans know “what the standards are, what practices they want to adopt to protect themselves,” he told CNN affiliate KPRC last week. “It’s time for individual responsibility.”

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