NE Fla. New Hotspot As Covid Ravages Low Vax Areas, Jax; Acute ICU Demand- FL, TX, AL, GA
The Guardian, Aug. 20, 2021. - Jacksonville hospitals ‘bracing for the worst.’ Acute ICU demand in Florida, Texas, Alabama and Georgia - Ed.
As quickly as one Covid patient is discharged, another waits for a bed in north-east Florida, the hot zone of the state’s latest coronavirus surge.
But the patients at Baptist Health’s 5 hospitals across Jacksonville are younger and getting sick from the virus faster than people did last summer. Baptist has more than 500 Covid patients, more than twice the number they had at the peak of Florida’s July 2020 surge, and the onslaught isn’t letting up. Hospital officials are anxiously monitoring 10 forecast models, converting empty spaces, adding over 100 beds and “bracing for the worst”, said Dr Timothy Groover, the hospitals’ interim chief medical officer.
“Jacksonville is kind of the epicenter of this. They had one of the lowest vaccination rates going into July and that has probably really came back to bite them,” said Justin Senior, CEO of the Florida Safety Net Hospital Alliance, which represents some of the largest hospitals in the state. Florida, Texas, Alabama and Georgia healthcare systems are all suffering from acute demand for dwindling intensive care unit (ICU) beds to accommodate seriously ill coronavirus patients.
Arkansas, Oregon, Hawaii, Louisiana and Mississippi have also set records for Covid-19 hospitalizations in recent weeks. The situation is highly exacerbated by the fact that those states have low vaccination rates compared with many other US states and virtually everyone who is sick or dying has not been vaccinated, in what the White House continues to call “a pandemic of the unvaccinated”.
Even where fully vaccinated people are catching coronavirus, they may
not have noticeable symptoms or they may get sick but are highly unlikely to end up in the ICU or dying because of Covid. Florida’s Duval county, which consists almost entirely of Jacksonville, is a racially diverse Democratic bastion, won by Joe Biden. The overwhelmingly white rural counties that surround it went firmly for Donald Trump...
More,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/20/coronavirus-covid-florida-unvaccinated-us
- Jacksonville hospital breaks Covid record with new surge, (NBC News).
= new reply since forum marked as read
I feel sorry for the hospital staff, the unvaccinated kids with stupid parents, and the vaccinated patients who can't get treatment for other things.