Montgomery, Alabama hit hard by Covid19 after being open for the last 10 days.

[NoRoadUntravelled]

-Snip-

Major hospitals in the Montgomery area have run out of ICU beds, Mayor Steven Reed said at a news conference Wednesday, while others only one or two beds left.
Patients in need of care are now instead being sent 90 miles away to Birmingham, Alabama, the mayor said, a step the city hasn’t had to take until now.

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[malaise]

1. Just watched him on Rachel

Shocking - several people should be locked up.

[Ferrets are Cool]

2. Gulf Shores and Orange Beach is going to be packed this weekend AND the casinos are

opening back up. I will be shocked if the hospitals aren't flooded with cases soon.
These idiots down here think this shit is over. It is nothing more than fanciful thinking...or lack thereof.

[misanthrope]

6. Except for the businesses that weren't allowed to open

You would have thought from the amount of traffic on the street that Mobile, Alabama had lifted all measures for the last third of April.

[Igel]

3. Don't know.

https://www.wsfa.com/2020/05/21/montgomery-hospitals-can-handle-icu-bed-shortages-state-health-officer-says/

https://www.alreporter.com/2020/05/20/montgomery-hospitals-are-out-of-icu-beds-mayor-says/

https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2020/05/21/montgomery-mayor-hospitals-asked-me-sound-alarm-over-icu-beds/5240903002/

Something doesn't add up. "Have diverted" versus "haven't diverted" is a flat-out contradiction.

[BrightKnight]

4. Can't get an ICU bed but can get a haircut and a table. nt

[misanthrope]

5. One of the reasons this has happened

Anyone who has ever been through Alabama's Black Belt knows the rural area is plainly built on the vestiges of plantation culture. It is poverty-wracked, with Americans living in conditions that UN veterans have described as being close to Third World conditions. Health care over the last 10 years has evaporated throughout the region with hospitals closing.

That means COVID-19 patients throughout the region are being sent to Montgomery and have now filled those facilities. If this continues, rural cases from just below the Black Belt's southern edge will have to be sent to Mobile next. That would mean patients from Clarke, Monroe, Conecuh, Escambia and Washington counties traveling to the Mobile Bay area, the state's hottest COVID-19 spot for the last month.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

7. That county is "red" (high infection rate) according...

... to CovidActNow.

It's not showing many ICU beds being used, though. I think that website is not very accurate, but it might provide a general idea of problem areas based on their limited information. It even states: "Because counties don’t report hospitalizations, our forecasts may not be as accurate."

https://covidactnow.org/us/al/county/montgomery_county

It's showing an even higher infection rate at a very close county to me in Ohio (2nd highest rate for the entire state), and that's indeed where I keep seeing so many people nonchalantly not wearing masks and interacting with each other in public. (The county of John Boehner*, and many Republicans.)

* Oh, he doesn't live in that county (Miami County OH) now.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

8. Was Italy's trouble so long ago that the mayor forgot?

[roamer65]

9. I wish we would use the MI National Guard to seal our southern state line.

I really don’t want a second wave, but I suspect it’s coming with all these states not phasing their reopening like we are up here.