Georgia Hospital Worker Sounds Alarm: 'I Have Never Ever Seen Anything Like This'

[Nevilledog]

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/16/891997539/georgia-hospital-worker-sounds-alarm-i-have-never-ever-seen-anything-like-this



The emergency room overflowed with patients. Then, the next wave arrived. This time on stretchers.

"They were lined up along the walls in the ER," a health care worker inside a Navicent Health-owned hospital in middle Georgia told GPB News. "We never have had an influx like that. Since the Fourth of July, it has just exploded."

Staff members did what they always do. They tended to patients as best they could. For the sickest patients, staff searched for available beds in nearby hospitals. In previous weeks, the health care worker said, COVID-19 patients typically got transported to medical centers about 70 miles north to Atlanta or 160 miles east to Savannah.

This week, there was no room. Desperate, the health care worker said, administrators began checking available hospitals in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida.

The distance stretched more than 850 miles north to south, from Louisville, Ky., down to Orlando, Fla.

"When you have to start shipping patients out of state, it's bad," the worker said. "When the hospitals are full, that's when it becomes really dangerous for everybody."

*snip*

[Laelth]

1. My hometown--Macon-Bibb County, Georgia.

This is very sad, but it’s equally infuriating because it was completely avoidable—if only we had competent leadership.

-Laelth

[Nevilledog]

2. And less selfish and stupid people.

[Hoyt]

4. My sympathies. I lived there for 3 years in the 80s. Loved the Indian mounds.

[Baitball Blogger]

3. They're shipping them to Orlando???

What the fuck! Outsourcing patients. Is this what Republicans call leadership?

[smirkymonkey]

5. Do they have the breakdown on the stats of the patients yet in the states

that are now being hit hardest? Here in New England (Boston Globe) we would get regular stats on the breakdown of cases in all of the NE States every few days: The # of overall positive cases, # hospitalized, those in ICU, deaths, cases by age, sex, ethnicity, and w/ or w/out co-morbidities, etc.

I'm especially interested in the age breakdown to see if this starting to infect more young adults and the middle aged, instead of just the elderly. There are still too many people out there who are walking around not taking this seriously because they don't think they will be seriously affected by it.