Officials in Springfield, Missouri are requesting state funds to establish an “alternate care site” for COVID-19 patients to help relieve the pressure on overwhelmed local hospitals.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the Springfield-Greene County Health Department and the Springfield-Greene County Office of Emergency Management submitted a funding request to the state. The facility would be used for transitional care for stable COVID-19 patients.<\/p>\n
The coronavirus has made a comeback in Missouri, and the highly contagious delta variant in particular has been linked to case spikes that are among the highest per capita in the country.<\/p>\n
By the numbers<\/strong>: There were 230 patients being treated for COVID-19 in Greene County hospitals as of Wednesday, the health department said; 104 of those are in critical care and 61 are on ventilators.<\/p>\n Greene County is averaging more than 196 cases per day, and “the increase in severe illness is projected to outpace hospital capacity,” officials said in a statement.<\/p>\n Coronavirus cases nationally have more than doubled since June, but the increase is especially sharp in areas with low vaccination. In Springfield-Greene County, only 40 percent of the eligible residents have been fully vaccinated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Officials in Springfield, Missouri are requesting...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37725"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37726,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37725\/revisions\/37726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}