I can't speak for Texas but I had a case of appendicitis in the family last year and the main reason for delays wasn't the number of people in the hospital but the new procedures in place.
The hospital was nearly empty except for COVID patients and life threatning emergencies. We cancelled 1 million doctor appointments and 300k surgeries in 2020 (in a 10 million population).
That figure alone is mind-bending and it's odd so many people have difficulty ingesting it.
When you have a 'highly contagious disease that kills people with compromised immune systems' (aka the sick and recovering, aka most people in hospitals) - the healthcare system is going to be materially degraded.
Each one of those 300 000 surgeries has an impact on someone's life that's not accounted for in the cost of COVID. And that's only for 10M people, it'd be almost 12M surgeries for the US overall if that ratio held.
And that's only one of the many disruptions.
After all of this has happened, it's really odd to see so many who can't seem to internalize the scope of all of this.
The hospital was nearly empty except for COVID patients and life threatning emergencies. We cancelled 1 million doctor appointments and 300k surgeries in 2020 (in a 10 million population).