The Environmental Protection Agency faces challenges during a government shutdown.

A Houston hospital has suspended 178 employees for two weeks without pay for not complying with demands that they be vaccinated against COVID-19.

More than 40% of Americans now live in areas running out of ICU space, with only 15% of beds still available. According to data through Thursday from the COVID Tracking Project, hospitalizations are still high in the West and the South, with over 80,000 current COVID-19 hospital patients in those regions. “Initially, when the COVID surges were hitting one part of the country at a time, traveling nurses were able to go to areas more severely affected. “There’s a lot of these agencies that are out there charging absolutely ridiculous sums of money to get ICU nurses in,” Boom said. Augusta University Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia, is treating adult ICU patients, under age 30, in the children’s hospital.

A MD Anderson Cancer Center building in the Texas Medical Center in Houston on June 26, 2020. These internal messages highlight the growing strain that the coronavirus crisis is putting on hospital systems in the Houston region, where the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has nearly quadrupled since Memorial Day. As of Tuesday, more than 3,000 people were hospitalized for the coronavirus in the region, including nearly 800 in intensive care. Just as New York hospitals did four months ago, some Houston hospitals have posted on traveling nurse websites seeking nurses for crisis response jobs.If they dont have the nursing staff, then you cant place the patient, Pea said. Houstons public hospitals, Ben Taub and Lyndon B. Johnson, dont have those same resources.

Statewide, there were 14,260 available hospital beds and nearly 1,500 intensive care unit beds as of Tuesday. In the hard-hit Houston region, hospitals have begun moving coronavirus patients from crowded ICUs to other facilities. Abbott spokesperson John Wittman said hospitals in Houston and Austin have been “emphatic” that beds will be available for coronavirus patients. Carrie Williams, a spokesperson for the Texas Hospital Association, also said Texas has enough hospital capacity, though she added that hospitalizations numbers are "definitely a concern." Facilities treating coronavirus patients could face challenges that go beyond bed space — like staffing shortages.