Couple months back the new owner of our local hospital, by their own description a “religious mission” better know as Avera AKA the Catholic Church, hinted that they wanted a new hospital and made a run at shaking down the local donors. This just after they shook us down for a new generator for the current hospital. And said Tyler Avera is one of 2 hospitals in a county of ~5000 with a geographical service area of even less people. Within 25 miles are 3 hospitals of similar size and a 4th much larger hospital with more capabilities than all the above in Marshall, a town of 13,000. Within 50 miles are 3 more hospitals, so we’re pretty well hospitalized around here. And did I mention that almost every one of them has been spending millions in additions and remodeling?
5 of these 7 hospitals have around 20-25 beds and 10-20% occupancy… Avera and their only competitor Sanford use the smaller hospitals as a front to suck patients into their 2 bigger hospitals and their 2 even bigger hospitals in Sioux Falls, which are usually pretty full. So we’ve got beds that will soon be needed, but how about equipment and staff? The 2 hospital chains are pretty secretive, but one of the smaller hospitals is still publicly owned and it’s public meetings provide some insight. With surplus beds they’re short help, having to fly in anesthesiologists and bring in EMTs from Thailand under visas. Given the maybe once a week visits by doctors and even PAs and NPs from the metros at the other small hospitals, it looks like we’ve got a health care labor shortage that needs to be addressed before those beds can be utilized. That said, we’ve got a lot of retired nurses around here, volunteer part time EMTs, etc.. I’m no expert on health care, so what’s your opinion?
On to our regularly scheduled update on testing results… Or maybe not. Problem is there’s real data quality problems with a lot of state’s reports, some haven’t done enough tests to have a good sample and some like Minnesota and South Dakota have run out of tests. So I’ll leave the links there for now, and add details where I find good data.
links to data and state resources:
Alabama:
Arkansas: 62 cases with cases in 15 rural counties, still no tests in many.
Iowa:
Kentucky: 40 cases with cases in 10 rural counties, most counties now testing.
Maine: 42 cases, half in Portland.
Minnesota: Out of tests
Mississippi: 50 cases, many in rural counties.
Montana:
North Dakota: 19 cases, 15 in Bismark area, 3 Minot area, 1 Fargo area.
New Hampshire:
Oklahoma: 44 cases, almost half in rural counties.
South Dakota: out of tests after 900+. 5 cases in rural counties.
Vermont:
West Virginia:
Wyoming: 18 cases, 6 in rural counties.
Neat site with data for every state, territories, etc.
Another neat site with localized data- We need more of these to track this pandemic!