‘It’s like a bomb blew up’: Doctors in Texas grapple with treating COVID patients in hospitals where ICU beds are in the single digits

• The rise in cases in Texas has led hospitals to nearly reach full capacity.
• The new wave in COVID-19 cases amid the spread of the Delta variant resulted in as little as six empty ICU beds in the city of Austin.
• Doctors working in the Texas capital told Insider about their experience working in hospitals overwhelmed with patients.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

It's the phone call that gets to Dr. Anna Vu-Wallace the most. At the end of her 12-hour shift in the intensive care unit in a city where bed availability is low, Vu-Wallace has to break harrowing news to family members of patients, especially younger ones, that their loved ones have died from COVID-19.

"You can hear the surprise, the wails, the screaming on the other end (of the phone) because it's so tragic – because many are healthy and didn't have any what we call comorbidities or any ongoing chronic illnesses that could have predicted their death," Vu-Wallace told Insider.

"The insanity of it all," she added, is seeing a patient that is "such a young life with so much promise."

Vu-Wallace is an internal medicine specialist at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas, which has seen a rapid rise in new coronavirus infections amid the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant. A surge in hospitalizations has left ICU beds in the city dwindling to the single digits, with only six available as of Monday.

"It's like a bomb blew up, and these people are just flying in the door," Vu-Wallace said.

She trained as a medical professional during the AIDS epidemic and noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has "been nothing like I have seen ever in my career."

Vu-Wallace primarily interacts with intubated patients and still tries to talk with them.

"Even though they're sedated, I feel they can sometimes still hear me. I tell them what I'm doing," she said. "Oftentimes, when I walk into a patient's room, it feels really somber. There are lines and tubes running from the patient, basically out towards the door because our nursing staff cannot be in there too long."

Patients admitted into the hospitals in the state are not only older or those with underlying conditions. More children in the state are contracting the virus, especially as some are too young to be vaccinated. The uptick in infections amongst kids comes in the midst of school districts in Austin and Dallas defying Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's order banning mask mandates in school. According to data from the New York Times, less than 50% of people in Texas are fully vaccinated.

"As far as in Texas, there seems to be such a divide. I still don't understand it. I don't know why there's such a divide between masks and vaccination," Vu-Wallace said. "I didn't expect them to refuse a life-saving tool like vaccination. And I certainly didn't expect politics to play a role in mask and all those things. It's almost like a slap in the face for us."

Across the country, the virus has quickly circulated through states with low vaccination rates, causing a rise in cases. Last week, President Joe Biden called the current wave of illnesses "a pandemic of the unvaccinated."

"The majority are unvaccinated. That's the other sad thing that we knew that if they just get vaccinated, they wouldn't be in our ICU," Vu-Wallace added. "So we're looking at a rapid surge that happened very quickly. And the majority of those unvaccinated folks are young; they're between their 20s and 40s."

Dr. Natasha Kathuria, an emergency medicine physician, based in Austin and board member of Global Outreach Doctors, told Insider that she has personally "not admitted a single vaccinated patient with COVID."

"There are some vaccinated patients in the hospital that are such a minority of the admissions for COVID-19," Kathuria said. "An overwhelming majority are unvaccinated, especially those who are in the ICU and critically ill on ventilators."

-Dr. Natasha Kathuria (@NataKathuriaMD) August 10, 2021

With patients overwhelming hospitals in the city, many medical professionals are exhausted and reportedly "burned out," leading some to quit altogether. According to Kathuria, the problem could have been mitigated if or altogether prevented if people were vaccinated and used face masks.

"We didn't have to be at this point where our hospitals are overflowing and beyond capacity. We didn't have to be at a point where now we have to compromise care to everyone, not just COVID patients," Kathuria said. "This involves every single patient in a hospital right now with strokes, heart attacks - care being delayed for every single patient once a hospital is at capacity."

"And unfortunately," she added, "when we get to the point where we are today, it's not just those who chose not to get vaccinated who suffer. It's all of us."