Hospitals in Oregon buckling under surge of COVID patients

By ANDREW SELSKY
Associated Press

Patients left on beds in hospital hallways, their monitoring machines beeping away as too few doctors and nurses attend to an overload of emergencies. People diagnosed with cancer or heart disease desperately needing treatments, but being turned away.  Hospital staffers and public health managers in southern Oregon say it’s never been this bad. And it’s apt to get worse as the super-contagious delta variant of COVID-19 spreads through a region where fewer than half the residents have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. On Thursday, there were a record number of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 across Oregon, at 670. A total of 177 were in intensive care units.