Idaho hospitals nearly buckling in relentless COVID surge
By REBECCA BOONE
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The intensive care rooms at St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center are full, each a blinking jungle of tubes, wires and mechanical breathing machines. The patients nestled inside are a lot alike: All unvaccinated, mostly middle-aged, paralyzed and sedated, reliant on life support and locked in a silent struggle against COVID-19.
But watch for a moment, and glimpses of who they were before the coronavirus become clear.
Artfully inked tattoos cover the tanned forearm of a man in his 30s. An expectant mother’s slightly swollen belly is briefly revealed as a nurse adjusts her position. The young woman is five months pregnant and hooked to a breathing machine.
Down the hall, another pregnant woman, just 24 and hooked to a ventilator, is lying prone — on top of her developing fetus — to get more air into her ravaged lungs.
Idaho hit a grim COVID-19 trifecta this week, reaching record numbers of emergency room visits, hospitalizations and ICU patients. Medical experts say the deeply conservative state will likely see 30,000 new infections a week by mid-September.
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