2022 was the worst for many US hospitals. The aftershocks will last for years.
VOX
Terry Scoggin, CEO of Titus Regional Medical Center in Mount Pleasant, Texas, saw his first Covid-19 surge in May 2020, when an outbreak at a meat processing plant filled almost all of his small hospital’s ICU beds.
But the worst of the pandemic didn’t come until 2022. By January, the hospital, the last independent rural hospital in northeast Texas, had lived through four separate surges in 18 months. They had reopened their building’s third floor, closed eight years ago, and relied on traveling nurses to staff their beds. Then, at the end of 2021, the government funding that had paid for that extra help ran out.
For the first two months of 2022, as patients lined the building’s hallways and his staff struggled to find anywhere else to send them, Scoggin said his hospital experienced its most traumatic trial yet.