âLike a bathtub filling upâ: Alabama is slammed by COVID-19
By JAY REEVES The Associated Press,Updated December 29, 2020, 12:43 p.m.
Email to a Friend
Nurses and medical staff made their way through the seventh floor COVID-19 unit at East Alabama Medical Center on Dec. 10 in Opelika, Ala.Julie Bennett/Associated Press
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) â With its dozen intensive care beds already full, Cullman Regional Medical Center began looking desperately for options as more and more COVID-19 patients showed up.
Ten beds normally used for less severe cases were transformed into intensive care rooms, with extra IV machines brought in. Video monitors were set up to enable the staff to keep watch over patients whenever a nurse had to scurry away to care for someone else.
Jacob “Jake” Files COVID-19, which has killed 1.7 million people worldwide, does not follow a uniform path.
Many infected patients remain asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. Others, especially those with comorbidities, can develop severe clinical disease with atypical pneumonia and multiple system organ failure.
Since the first cases were reported in December 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has surged into a pandemic, with cases and deaths still mounting. Ongoing observational clinical research has become a priority to better understand how this previously unknown virus acts, and findings from this research can better inform treatment and vaccine design.
University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers, led by first-author Jacob “Jake” Files and co-senior authors Nathan Erdmann, M.D., Ph.D., and Paul Goepfert, M.D., have now reported their observational study, “Sustained cellular immune dysregulation in individuals recovering from SARS-CoV-2 infectio
âLike a bathtub filling upâ: Alabama is slammed by the virus By JAY REEVES | December 29, 2020 at 12:06 PM CST - Updated December 29 at 11:12 PM
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) â With its dozen intensive care beds already full, Cullman Regional Medical Center began looking desperately for options as more and more COVID-19 patients showed up.
Ten beds normally used for less severe cases were transformed into intensive care rooms, with extra IV machines brought in. Video monitors were set up to enable the staff to keep watch over patients whenever a nurse had to scurry away to care for someone else.
The patch did the job â for the time being, at least.
Alabama slammed by COVID: ‘We can’t grieve for 1 patient before we have to take care of another’
Updated Dec 29, 2020;
Posted Dec 29, 2020
East Alabama Medical Center nurse Abby Smith works on a COVID-19 patient in the intensive care unit Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020, in Opelika, Ala. The medical center faces a new influx of COVID-19 patients as the pandemic intensifies. (AP Photo/Julie Bennett)AP
Facebook Share
With its dozen intensive care beds already full, Cullman Regional Medical Center began looking desperately for options as more and more COVID-19 patients showed up.
Ten beds normally used for less severe cases were transformed into intensive care rooms, with extra IV machines brought in. Video monitors were set up to enable the staff to keep watch over patients whenever a nurse had to scurry away to care for someone else.