And we have now made the New York Times:
Here are some quotes from the article:
This rural county in southwest Georgia, 40 miles from the nearest interstate, now has one of the most intense clusters of the coronavirus in the country.
With a population of only 90,000, Dougherty County has registered 24 deaths, far more than any other county in the state, with six more possible coronavirus deaths under investigation, according to Michael L. Fowler, the local coroner. Ninety percent of the people who died were African-American, he said.
The region’s hospitals are overloaded with sick and dying patients, having registered nearly 600 positive cases. Last week, Gov. Brian Kemp dispatched the National Guard to help stage additional intensive care beds and relieve exhausted doctors and nurses.
Dougherty County, dominated by cotton plantations in the 19th century, routinely ranks near the bottom of Georgia’s 159 counties in terms of most health outcomes, with high rates of diabetes and lung disease, and its first coronavirus cases did not stand out to doctors as something unusual.
The six-month stockpile of protective equipment that the hospital had prepared was gone, Mr. Steiner said, in seven days.
At first the doctors and nurses just tried to take in what they were seeing: a series of people — including young people in relatively good health — showing up with a cough and fever.
Then, alarmingly, their need for oxygen would sharply increase, and they would go into full-blown respiratory failure, their lungs filling with fluid, said Dr. Enrique Lopez, 41, a surgical intensivist, who specializes in treating the critically ill.
“All the units were full, all of them, and there would be days when we would be intubating five people in a row, back to back, room after room after room,” he said. “It was one of the times in my career I truly felt overwhelmed.”
The cases arrived in great waves, overwhelming each new effort to add beds.
The 14 medical intensive care unit beds were filled within two days of the first wave of coronavirus patients; they converted 12 cardiac I.C.U. beds, but those, too, were filled two days later; 12 beds in the surgical I.C.U. were filled three days after that, Mr. Steiner said.
For a few days, the hospital was so short of staff members that employees who had tested positive but did not yet have symptoms were asked to work.
Stay safe.