HOUSTON — As phase two of Texas’ plan to reopens rolls out, there is no one watching it closer than Dr. Marc Boom. He is the CEO of Houston Methodist.
“The governor’s order is really about turning back on the economy, so we can recover economically, it’s not about turning on our social lives," Dr. Boom said.
“We’ve seen some small surge in positive cases over the last week, but the positivity rate has not gone up and we’ve not seen the hospitalization rate go up."
Boom said the highest number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized at Houston Methodist at any given time was 213. Now, the number is around 100.
“I think if we are going to see some changes, it’s right about now. And you know my hope would be as the governor continues to debate to ease restrictions, he continues to be cautious,” Dr. Boom said.
Cautious because he’s already thinking beyond summer.
“That’s going to take a lot of vigilance on the part of our whole community to say how do we make sure we see it coming, we handle it, we contact trace, we test and we keep it from getting out of hand this fall if it does start to get higher," he said.
Boom said we need about 2-3 weeks of data to know if what we're doing is working. He said by the end of this week, we should have a good idea of how well Houston handled the first phase.