Hospitals overwhelmed: Exhausted staffs, surging COVID-19 cases push nation's limits
Source: USA Today
As the United States adds a new coronavirus case every second, hospitals from West Texas to Wisconsin are overwhelmed with the soaring number of critically ill Americans.
In many cases, it’s not a lack of hospital beds, therapies or equipment that worry managers amid the surge, with someone dying from COVID-19 in the U.S. nearly every two minutes. It’s the depleted and exhausted hospitals staffs needed to care for those who need life-sustaining therapies.
The head of the Utah Hospital Association this week warned the situation is getting so dire hospitals there might soon need to ration care. Hospitals in North and South Dakota are seeking staff reinforcements to care for patients in crowded intensive care units. And in Wisconsin, hospitals are opening makeshift ICU wings even as they desperately look for nurses and other clinicians to staff the facilities.
“We can keep converting ICU space,” said Jeffrey Pothof, an emergency room doctor in Madison, Wisconsin. “But the constraint will be the staffing … that’s the thing that worries us the most right now.”
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/hospitals-overwhelmed-exhausted-staffs-surging-covid-19-cases-push-nations-limits/ar-BB1ayYXL?li=BBnb7Kz
Of course, Trump has been arguing that this is all fake news.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/10/31/trump-claims-doctors-profiting-attributing-deaths-covid-19/6101540002/
WASHINGTON – Medical groups are slamming President Donald Trump for resurfacing a baseless conspiracy on campaign stops that doctors are inflating the number of COVID-19 deaths in the USA in order to drive up profits during the pandemic.
"You know, our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID. You know that, right?" Trump told a rally in Waterford Township, Mich., on Friday, resurfacing a claim he has made for weeks. "I mean, our doctors are very smart people...so, what they do is they say, 'I'm sorry, but, you know, everybody dies of COVID.'"
Trump is running for reelection during a pandemic that has killed nearly 230,000 Americans, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Democratic opponent Joe Biden has made the Trump administration's handling of the virus a central theme.
Medical groups, including the American Medical Association, have denounced Trump's assertion that doctors are inflating the number of deaths. Dr. Susan Bailey, the president of that group, called Trump's claim "malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided."
= new reply since forum marked as read
when they were not only bringing in volunteers from other states, but were bringing in volunteer staff out of retirement and/or anyone with previous hospital/medic/medical experience (e.g., vets), and even 4th year med students - https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85655 and https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/call-virus-volunteers-yields-army-health-care-workers-69920370
We had a similar "medical corps" here in PA too.
It's not like there isn't a complete blueprint on what to do. The difference is that these measures were done in concert with complete shutdowns that helped to cut off the rampant infections and slowly get the community spread of the virus under control. However the states that are being most impacted NOW are the same ones run by people who insulted the "'socialist libs" in "'Democrat (sic)-run blue states" for the types of initial draconian measures needed to reign this virus in. So now with them facing the same predicament, they are like deer in the headlights because they certainly had no plan for how to deal with what they insultingly insisted was "an overblown, fake disease". 
