Rural Hospitals Brace For Coronavirus
Small-town hospitals are under-equipped to deal with the coronavirus, and administrators warn it's a misperception that people in isolated rural areas are safer from exposure.
In Grangeville, Idaho, population 3,000, Syringa Hospital has just 15 beds, an emergency room and a clinic. As is common in rural medicine, the chief medical officer, Dr. Matthew Told, is also a family practice OB and, on a recent evening, the on-call ER doc.
"We don't have ventilator services, we don't have respiratory therapy," Told says during a break between seeing patients.
There is no intensive care unit. So when they do get a critically ill patient or trauma victims, it's standard protocol to stabilize and transfer
