PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Rhode Island has opened two field hospitals that combined have more than 900 beds as the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the state reached a new high.
There were 410 patients in the state’s hospitals with the disease as of Sunday, the most recent date for which the information was available, the state Department of Health reported Tuesday. That is the highest number of people hospitalized with the disease on a single day since the pandemic began.
Care New England opened a field hospital with more than 300 beds in Cranston on Monday, the same day the state sent an emergency alert saying conventional hospitals had reached their coronavirus capacity.
A facility with nearly 600 beds opened Tuesday at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence. It is run by Lifespan, the state’s largest hospital group.
The Lifespan facility expects to admit 24 to
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Nearly 37,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in November, the most in any month since the dark early days of the pandemic, engulfing families in grief, filling newspaper obituary pages and testing the capacity of morgues, funeral homes and hospitals.
Amid the resurgence, states have begun reopening field hospitals to handle an influx of patients that is pushing health care systems — and their workers — to the breaking point. Hospitals are bringing in mobile morgues. And funerals are being livestreamed or performed as drive-by affairs.
Health officials fear the crisis will be even worse in coming weeks, after many Americans ignored pleas to stay home over Thanksgiving and avoid people who don’t live with them.
“I have no doubt that we’re going to see a climbing death toll … and that’s a horrific and tragic place to be,” said Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy at the Kaiser
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MEMPHIS, Mo. (AP) — As Dr. Shane Wilson makes the rounds at the tiny, 25-bed hospital in rural northeastern Missouri, many of his movements are familiar in an age of coronavirus. Masks and gloves. Zippered plastic walls between hallways. Hand sanitizer as he enters and exits each room.
But one thing is starkly different. Born and raised in the town of just 1,800, Wilson knows most of his patients by their first names.
He visits a woman who used to be a gym teacher at his school, and later laughingly recalls a day she caught him smoking at school and made him and a friend pick up cigarette butts as punishment. Another man was in the middle of his soybean harvest when he fell ill and couldn’t finish.
In November, Wilson treated his own father, who along with his wife used to work at the same hospital. The 74-year-old elder
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JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi hospitals are administering a new antibody therapy to coronavirus patients in hopes that it will improve outcomes and limit hospitalizations as new cases of coronavirus are on the rise.
Monoclonal antibodies were approved on Nov. 21 through emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The therapy can be used by high-risk patients who have tested positive for the virus and have not yet been hospitalized.
The one dose is administered intravenously and can be used in individuals ages 12 or older, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health.
“The goal is to keep them out of the hospital and keep them from decompensating more,” said Dr. Alan Jones, University of Mississippi Medical Center Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Clinical Affairs, last week at a briefing with press.
George Regional Hospital in Lucedale administered the treatment for the first time to two COVID-19 positive
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