As rural hospitals have closed, nearby cities like Athens, Ga., have absorbed more patients. Covid-19 will test them.
. As these hospitals leave, the facilities in nearby cities and towns pick up the slack, said Brock Slabach, vice president of the National Rural Health Association. The closure of Hart County Hospital in 2012 a few counties away, for instance, sent those patients to the Athens hospital region—what people in the industry call a “catchment” area, like a stream bed.
Even before coronavirus, an influx of new patients to city hospitals added strain, both because of their sheer numbers and the unique health problems of rural populations. Rural patients tend to be older, poorer, and in worse general health than urban residents, said Slabach and Adams, all of which can make a coronavirus infection much worse. “Places like rural Georgia will see greater complications and death rates because of these conditions,” Slabach said.
Infected residents of Albany and environs were sent to Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, which serves a catchment area of 15 counties and had only 38 ICU beds at the onset of the epidemic.of those beds were filled at the beginning of April, and the hospital later rushed to expand its overall fleet to 49. The staff ran out of masks so quickly that one team was assigned to sew new ones out of bedsheets.
National Guard medic, Dr. Brett Atchley, M.D., was assigned to Piedmont Athens Regional, where, in civilian life he is an ER doctor. He goes to work in scrubs one day, and the next puts on his Air National Guard uniform, shifting from hands-on treatment of patients to coordinating big-picture planning with the hospital administration, National Guard troops assigned to the area, and GEMA, the Georgia Emergency Management Agency.
Kemp was notoriously slow in issuing a statewide shelter-in-place policy, which he eventually announced would go into effect on April 3. Until then, though, Georgia was a patchwork of Covid response policies, with noticeable differences between rural, suburban and urban areas. Athens’ mayor and commissioners were quick to act, for instance, issuing a stay-at-home order for residents on March 20. Nearby counties issued such orders much later, as did many other areas of Georgia.
“There will be a two- to three-week lag time in the shelter-in-place policies paying off,” Adams said of policies passed by Athens-Clarke County commissioners and mayor Kelly Girtz. “Counties that Athens-Clarke County hospitals serve did not have shelter-in-place policies, yet their residents will come here to be cared for when they get very sick.”
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