Alabama healthcare facilities were nearing capacity when Governor Kay Ivey spoke to reporters on Thursday. Despite a scarcity of tests, there were more than 630 verified Covid-19 cases in the state, more than 100 of whom were hospitalized, and dozens of patients on ventilators. Regional reports suggested that the actual variety of those hospitalized with the virus may have been closer to 300, but many clients suffering from acute breathing health problems went uncounted.
At that time, majority of all Americans were living under state-issued shelter-in-place orders in an effort to suppress the spread of the unique coronavirus. Ivey had not issued such an order. And she had no plans to, she stated on a press call.
” Y’ all, we are not Louisiana, we are not New York state, we are not California,” Ivey said, highlighting the disastrous effect more strict social distancing steps might have on the state’s economy. “Today is not the time to order individuals to shelter in place.”
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Her own lieutenant guv disagreed. The day before, Will Ainsworth wrote a memo to Ivey’s pandemic task force greatly slamming the guv’s piecemeal reaction to the crisis and prompting stricter social distancing procedures. “A tsunami of healthcare facility clients is most likely to fall upon Alabama in the not too distant future,” Ainsworth wrote, saying the guv’s task force and the state “are not taking a practical view” of the crisis. “Time is our opponent, and each minute that we lose by not preparing for the coming deluge will result in the death and the debilitating of our healthcare infrastructure.”
By now, the dispersing pandemic has led state and local authorities to order more than two-thirds of Americans to shelter in place. But some states have actually resisted, even as the virus’s toll installs. In Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota, calls from public health professionals to institute strict social distancing measures have actually mostly fallen on deaf ears.
Instead, governors in these states have actually selected a more laissez-faire technique, putting the onus of high-stakes public health choices on city and county officials. As the illness’s toll worsens, some guvs have executed piecemeal strategi
