A lot of them are Covid.” He actually trained at the hospital, Elmhurst, that sort of came to represent one of the hardest-hit hospitals in New York City.

I’ve been reporting from hospitals in New York City from the beginning.

I looked at the emergency room, new I.C.U.s, pregnant mothers who had coronavirus, and now I’m in Houston?

So we are here at Houston Methodist Hospital, which is the largest hospital in Houston?

And right at this moment, the number of coronavirus cases is really rising dramatically in the city.

Are you having chest pain?” Like many patients we’re meeting, he’s part of a family where multiple members have tested positive?

When was that?” “OK.” What they’re finding now at the hospitals is that people who are coming in for all kinds of what seem to be just their regular illnesses may, in fact, have Covid, too.

Like many people, she had really tried to be careful, but she let her guard down and she got sick and was very close to having to have a breathing tube yesterday.

Aric Bakshy, an emergency physician at Houston Methodist, had to decide which coronavirus patients he should admit to the increasingly busy hospital and which he could safely send home.

To discuss questions like these, he has turned to doctors at hospitals where he trained in New York City that were overwhelmed by the coronavirus this spring.

Meanwhile, friends at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens told him that their emergency department was seeing only one or two virus patients a day.

Like New York City in March, the Houston hospitals are experiencing a steep rise in caseloads that is filling their beds, stretching their staffing, creating a backlog in testing and limiting the availability of other medical services.

Methodist is swiftly expanding capacity and hiring more staff, including local nurses who had left their jobs to work in New York when the city’s hospitals were pummeled.

“A bed’s a bed until you have a staff,” said Avery Taylor, the nurse manager of a coronavirus unit created just outside Houston in March.

Other Houston hospitals are seeing similar streams of patients.

Inundated public hospitals are sending some patients to private institutions like Methodist while reportedly transferring others to Galveston, 50 miles away.

But one treatment shown to shorten hospital stays, the antiviral drug remdesivir, is being allocated by the state, and hospitals here have repeatedly run out of it.

Methodist’s leaders, who were planning for a surge and had been dealing with a stream of coronavirus patients since March, pointed to the most important difference between Houston now and New York then: the patient mix.

The majority of new patients here are younger and healthier and are not as severely ill as many were in New York City, where officials report that over 22,000 are likely to have died from the disease.

Sylvie de Souza, head of the emergency department at Brooklyn Hospital Center, which on Friday reported no new coronavirus admissions and no current inpatient cases, said that she was receiving distressing text messages from doctors elsewhere in the country asking for advice.

One of the most worrisome trends, hospital administrators said, is the increased politicization of public health measures against the virus.

At some Houston hospitals, visitors and patients have refused to wear masks, creating conflicts with security guards at entrances.

Many hospitals in New York during the earlier crisis essentially became all-Covid units and endured billions of dollars in losses.

The easiest surgeries to maintain are those that do not require a hospital stay, like treatment for cataracts.

A key strategy to maintain services is increasing what hospital officials call throughput — discharging patients as quickly as is safely possible.

Alexander Nelson-Fryar, a 25-year-old treated for coronavirus pneumonia at Methodist, was discharged from the hospital this past week.

Hours after he left, he said, he began laboring to breathe and an ambulance sped him back to Methodist.

As cases began rising in New York, some overwhelmed emergency departments sent home coronavirus patients only to see them return gravely ill or die.

As a result, she said, she came to believe that any patient aside from those with the mildest symptoms should be admitted to the hospital or otherwise monitored.

Bakshy, the Methodist emergency room doctor, who trained at Bellevue and Mount Sinai in New York, said that he was conferring with his former colleagues.

Nearly 40 percent of all emergency room patients at Methodist are now testing positive; some of them lack symptoms.

Hospitals in New York tended to move patients within their own systems to level loads.

This past week, Methodist sent a team to a nearby public hospital to accept transfer patients.

Top officials from Methodist and the other flagship hospitals that make up the Texas Medical Center, normally competitors, consult regularly by phone.

The private institutions have also agreed to take turns, with others in the state, accepting patients from rural hospitals.

One morning this past week, Molly Tipps, a registered nurse, brought some medications to an older patient at the Methodist ward outside Houston.

At Methodist’s flagship hospital in central Houston, Rosa V.

She is on the maximum setting, but can talk to the clinical team and exchange text messages with her daughter, who is also a Methodist inpatient with the coronavirus.

She is getting remdesivir, an antiviral that was tested in clinical trials in New York and Houston, among other cities, and a new experimental drug.

As virus cases increased, the supplies ran short, said Katherine Perez, an infectious-disease specialist at the hospital.

“In Houston, every hospital that’s gotten the drug, everyone’s just kind of used it up,” she said.

As cases rise, Methodist researchers are being flooded with offers to participate in studies, with about 10 to 12 new opportunities a week being vetted centrally.

Without solid research, “your option is to do a bunch of unproven, potentially harmful, potentially futile, interventions to very sick people who are depending on you,” said Dr.

Boom, the Methodist chief executive, said if he could preserve one thing from the New York experience in March, it would be how the country came together as it had in previous disasters.

When cases began rising again in Texas, hospital officials here spent close to a month trying to educate the public about the risks of contagion.

“A lot of the masks that people are wearing in public don’t do very much,” said Dr.

McCall, a retired nurse, said that until the coronavirus, she told people she thought she had seen everything.