COVID-19 is hitting a handful states harder than anywhere else — California, Oklahoma, Texas and Tennessee. And in Tennessee, hospitals are having to improvise, as nearly 3,000 people are hospitalized for COVID-19 and treatment is underway for far more COVID patients than ever thought possible.
Clinicians say they are trying to bend but not break as they wait for vaccines.
"If we have another surge after Christmas and New Year's like we did after Thanksgiving, it will completely break our hospitals," Tennessee Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey said this week.
A couple of Tennessee's rural hospitals have requested ventilators from the state's emergency stockpile. A federal emergency team has been sent to the mountainous northeast part of the state. And alternative care sites that were set up months ago, to deal with this kind of patient surge, are empty — rendered useless because there's no staff to run them.
From outside the hospital walls, it's impossible to see how serious the situation is. Visitors are largely kept out. Patients aren't spilling into the street. Ambulances don't line up around the block.
But inside, hospitals are frantically constructing new COVID units.

The situation is still not optimistic, it can be said to be very bad! More and more people are infected, and even hospitals have become dangerous places. Everyone must keep social distance and take protective measures!