‘This is gut-wrenching’: Conway hospital once again installing outdoor COVID-19 tents
The blue and white cylindrical triage tents used to test and treat possible COVID-19 patients are once again being installed outside Conway Medical Center (CMC).
“Truly this is gut-wrenching,” said Dr. Paul Richardson, Chief Medical Officer, of the need to re-install the tents as coronavirus numbers once again surge in Horry County. “We do not want to do this, we feel like it is necessary.”
Necessary, Richardson said, because CMC has seen hospitalizations due to coronavirus jump “dramatically” from single digits just two weeks ago to well over twenty during the last week.
As of Thursday, there were 25 COVID-19 patients, 12 of those in the intensive care unit and seven on ventilators.
Horry County’s surge in cases and hospitalizations comes as the nation grapples with the super-contagious Delta variant. Individual hospitals don’t have the ability to test for specific variants, but the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control selects random positive cases across the state to test for the variants in order to track the spread. The Pee Dee region — which includes Horry County — has 63 identified Delta variant cases, but in reality the number is likely much higher since not all positive cases are tested for the variant.
The “triage tents” outside the emergency department were originally installed in March of 2020. They were taken down May 27, when the facility had just five COVID-19 patients. But during the last weeks of July and the first week of August, cases have continued to rapidly rise.
The tents allow staff to triage, evaluate and treat patients with respiratory illness, as well as to test for COVID-19 and Flu viruses while limiting exposure to Emergency Department patients and staff.
Richardson says replacing the tents is “absolutely a step back.”
“To have to put these tents back up because our numbers are going back up to the levels they are necessary is very discouraging,” the doctor said. “We are on a trajectory to head back towards numbers we haven’t seen for nearly a year.”
Richardson, like most medical professionals, emphasizes the importance of vaccination to avoid or lesson the effects COVID-19. Conway Medical Center provides vaccines at its walk-in-clinic on Mondays and Wednesdays at CMC Health Plaza South on Highway 707. No appointment is necessary.
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Education reporter Mary Norkol contributed to this report.
This story was originally published August 5, 2021 at 3:52 PM.
