The vital signs of the 30-year-old COVID-19 victim were crashing, and Kearny County Hospital in rural Lakin, Kansas, just wasn’t equipped to handle the case.
Miller, Kearny’s chief medical officer - who doubles as the county health officer - called around to larger hospitals in search of an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bed. With coronavirus cases soaring throughout Kansas, he said, he couldn’t find a single one.
After pounding big U.S. cities in the spring, COVID-19 now has engulfed rural and small-town America, seeming to seep into the country’s every nook and cranny.
According to Reuters’ interviews with more than a dozen medical care providers and public health officials in the nation’s heartland, many hospitals are severely lacking in beds, equipment and - most critically - clinical staff, including specialists and nurses.
COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are spiking nationally. But the Midwest - encompassing a dozen states between Ohio and the Dakotas - has been especially brutalized.
Reported case rates are more than double that of any other region in the United States, according to the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run data provider. From mid-June to mid-November, reported cases in the Midwest rose more than twentyfold.
For the week ending November 19, North Dakota reported an average of 1,769 daily new cases per 1 million residents, according to the tracking project.
South Dakota recorded nearly 1,500 per million residents, Wisconsin and Nebraska around 1,200, and Kansas nearly 1,000.
Even in New York’s worst week in April - with business closed and panic gripping the public - the state never averaged more than 500 new cases per million people. California never topped 253.
Read more from the original article:
면책 조항: 본 게시글에 표현된 견해는 전적으로 작성자의 견해이며 Followme의 공식 입장을 대변하지 않습니다. Followme는 제공된 정보의 정확성, 완전성 또는 신뢰성에 대해 책임을 지지 않으며, 서면으로 명시적으로 언급되지 않는 한 해당 내용을 기반으로 취해진 어떠한 조치에 대해서도 책임을 지지 않습니다.
더 오래된 의견은 없습니다. 소파를 가장 먼저 잡으십시오.