With coronavirus spreading rapidly through pockets of rural Georgia, the state is shifting 80 of its overflow hospital beds from Atlanta to Milledgeville.
The Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency said Wednesday that it will move beds out of the little-used temporary facility at the Georgia World Congress Center and set them up 100 miles southeast inside a shuttered youth military academy. As the downtown Atlanta site was designed to do, Milledgeville’s makeshift hospital will treat patients with mild to moderate symptoms who don’t need ventilators or critical care, relieving hospitals that could be overrun in another surge.
Gov. Brian Kemp said in a news release that the Milledgeville location “is more centrally located for many medical facilities throughout Georgia.
“We continue monitoring the virus data to enable us to ‘right size' the resources and response so we can ensure every COVID-19 patient gets the care they need."
“We continue monitoring the virus data to enable us to ‘right size’ the resources and response so we can ensure every COVID-19 patient gets the care they need,” the governor’s statement said.
Professor’s take
Amber Schmidtke, an assistant professor of microbiology at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, said the Milledgeville location makes sense because it’s near the border of two hospital zones on GEMA’s maps that have struggled with patient demand. Region H, which includes hard-hit Hancock County, had only 3 critical care beds available Wednesday. Region E, which surrounds the Athens area, had 14 critical care beds Wednesday.
“I think it’s mainly motivated to help with some of the rural hospital burden, because there are many counties that don’t have a hospital,” said Schmidtke, who posts daily analyses of state data to a Facebook page that has 9,600 followers. “And especially in Region H, the hospitals can be two counties away, and some of these counties take 45 minutes to an hour to drive through.”
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