Rural U.S. Hospitals Are On Life Support As a Third Wave of COVID-19 Strikes

When COVID-19 hit the Southwest Georgia Regional Medical Center in Cuthbert, a small rural town in Randolph County, in late March, the facility—which includes a 25-bed hospital, an adjacent nursing home and a family-medicine clinic, was quickly overwhelmed. In just a matter of days, 45 of the 62 nursing home residents tested positive. Negative residents were isolated in the hospital while the severely ill patients from both the nursing home and the local community were transferred to other better-equipped facilities. “We were trying to get the patients out as fast as possible,” says Steve Whatley, Southwest Georgia Regional’s board chairman. “It was a daily nightmare.” The scramble was exacerbated by a dire lack of medical necessities. Employees had to diligently conserve personal protective equipment. The hospital had no ventilators. And the nursing home’s air systems had to be retrofitted to create negative-pressure rooms to contain the airborne virus particles. Making matters even worse, one of the county’s only two physicians became ill with a severe respiratory disease unrelated to the coronavirus, while the other had an unexpected surgery requiring eight weeks of recovery time. Nurse practitioners stepped up as Southwest Georgia Regional waited for backup from neighboring health care organizations. More than 30 of 200 employees stopped working out of fear or because they got sick; the state of Georgia provided six nurses ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news