The patient must be moved, Dr. Drew Miller realized. Kearny County Hospital in Rural Lakin, Kansas, was also not able to exploit this situation. The key emblem of the 30 years-old COVID-19 was collapsing. Miller, Chief Medical Officer of Kearny – who twice as county health officer – asked for an ICU bed at larger hospitals. He said he couldn’t see one of the cases of coronavirus floating around Kansas.
Miller claims that somehow the guy got a pulse back, and he was sending in an ambulance some 25 miles from the bigger hospital. Then Miller was praying with the boys, whom Lakin, a town of a few thousand inhabitants, knew very well.
“He really survived a miracle,” Miller said.
Now COVID-19 has eaten up the rural and small towns of America, since pouring over major U.S. towns in summer. According to interviews by Reuters with over a dozen healthcare professionals and public health authorities in the heartland of the country, many hospitals, including experts and caregivers, have a significant shortage of beds, supplies, and nursing personnel.
COVID-19 cases and nationwide hospitalizations spike. But the Midwest – which involves a dozen Ohio-Dakota states – was particularly brutalized. According to the COVID Monitoring Project, the recorded case rates are more than twice as high as any other area in the United States. Cases recorded in the Midwest increased more than 20-fold from the middle of June to mid-November.
North Dakota registered on average 1,769 new cases per 1 million people per week ended 19 November, according to the surveillance project. Nearly 1,500 inhabitants were registered in southern Dakota, about 1,200 in Wisconsin, Nebraska and about 1,000 in Kansas. The state never averaged over 500 new cases per million in New York’s toughest week in April – with company closed and fear swept away. It has never overtaken 253 California.
Officials of Midwest Hospital told Reuters that they were at or around that capacity. Some also sought to improve access by repurposing flanges and clustering many patients in a single room and demanding that staff work longer hours and shifts more often.
For this, it was not built facilities such as Kearny, known as the ‘essential access’ hospitals. Frequently slightly funded, people who live long distances from major health centers are primarily provided with basic or emergency services. “We now need to plan to care for anyone,” Miller said a family medicine specialty.
As cases in many conservative states and provinces are on the rise, doctors also admit they face the challenge of encouraging patients and municipal officials to take it seriously.
These points of view fluctuate from above. President Donald Trump often held rallies in the Midwest and elsewhere from shoulder to shoulder, treating masks as a matter of personal preference. While Trump has not been reelected, his term continues for about 2 months, and his coronavirus policy is unchanged even as the crisis rises.
A call for comments had not been received by the White House press office.
In July, she organized an Independence Day celebration with Trump at Mount Rushmore, where the crowd was close together and several people who were present were without a mask. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem declined to order mask, but did not ban companies or public hearings, claiming that she was leaving those matters “individually responsible.”
Doctors claim that it might be a futile job to change such behavior. “We [all] continue to live,” said Schwartz, “but we feel like we drowned in a certain way.”
