MEMPHIS, Tennessee —
One of the more startling revelations Wednesday came from the infectious disease specialist who is advising the city of Memphis in this crisis.
The story, posted on The Commercial Appeal website, says a wave of COVID-19 patients is now hitting Memphis hospitals, and that we will need to launch a 1,000-bed facility in the coming days.
That specialist, Dr. Manoj Jain, answers questions related to that article.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, whose analytics you follow closely, shows a dramatic increase in patients for Tennessee. In fact, by Friday we'll be out of ICU beds and a week later, more patients than all hospital beds. We really try to be a calm, measured voice in all this, but when people hear that we need six times more ICU beds than we have and three times the ventilators, are we doing enough? What do we need to be doing? What's being done to staff this 1,000-bed temporary hospital and mobilizing up from 500 to 2,000 to 3,000 tests a day?
Politicians are guiding policy on this pandemic. compared to other states, we're moving pretty slowly. Tennessee's governor still refuses to issue mandatory shelter at home statewide. Mississippi's governor Wednesday ordered statewide shelter at home. Arkansas’ governor? Nothing at all. From the city level to the state level, are our elected officials conveying how serious this is? Is there any hope still of flattening the curve?