THE HILL – Florida is requesting hundreds of ventilators from the federal government after a surge in COVID-19 across the state.
The request was made Friday for 300 ventilators “to replace expended state stores,” the document said.
It was not clear how the ventilators would be allocated, but they were expected to arrive in the state Monday, according to the outlet.
The request comes as the delta variant spreads mostly among unvaccinated individuals and Florida sees more coronavirus cases and hospitalizations.
The Florida Department of Health tweeted Monday night that the numbers the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was reporting were incorrect that and the state had more than 15,000 cases as of Sunday … READ MORE.
Florida hospitals are overrun as state fights one of the worst Covid outbreaks in the U.S.
AUG 11 2021
CNBC – Dr. David Wein, an emergency medicine physician at Tampa General Hospital in Florida, said the Covid-19 outbreak there is the most severe he and his colleagues have witnessed since the pandemic began.
In Hillsborough County, where Tampa General Hospital is located, the number of new Covid cases has reached an average of about 1,200 per day, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That’s more than twice the national rate when adjusting for population.
Covid patients are now occupying nearly 200 of Tampa General Hospital’s 1,041 beds as of Tuesday, according to data provided by the hospital, which serves western Florida and the greater Tampa Bay region.
Sixty-one patients are in the ICU. The surge in patients, most of them unvaccinated, is causing a strain on the hospital’s 8,000-plus member staff, Wein said.
“Everyone is working at full capacity and then some, and it feels like we’ve been that way for a long time,” Wein said Tuesday in a phone interview. He added the hospital was beginning to run low on nurses. “It’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel right now … ” READ MORE.
