Too many cases, too few hospital beds in Texas towns

Just 14 beds are in the hospital that the 1,300 people of Iraan rely on in their part of west Texas－and none is for intensive care.

The only doctors in town are family physicians with emergency room experience. The closest hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients－equipped with ventilators, specialists and intensive-care unit beds－are around 130 kilometers away in the cities of Midland, Odessa and San Angelo.

That leaves many in Iraan worried as COVID-19 takes its toll on the oilfield town and other rural communities in the southern US state.

In recent weeks, about 50 residents of Iraan tested positive for the coronavirus and three of them had to be flown out for needed treatment, the Texas Tribune reported. No one in Iraan has died due to COVID-19.

The town's public school district shut down after only five days of classes because about a quarter of the school's staff of 70 and 16 percent of the 335 students were either infected with or exposed to the coronavirus, according to Superintendent Tracy Canter. The opening of school will be delayed until Monday.

Those numbers were more than the district saw for all of last year, she told the Tribune. The high infection rate makes it hard for such a small school district because employees may perform several jobs.

Iraan General Hospital chief executive Jason Rybolt told CNN that 119 residents had tested for the virus, and 50 tested positive during a two-week span in August－a positivity rate of 42 percent. "This is very serious," Iraan Mayor Darren Brown told CNN.

Resident Vicky Zapata said: "We had had COVID before, but never to this magnitude." Of those residents who had to be airlifted elsewhere, she said that at least one was taken out of state because of a lack of available ICU beds in Texas.

Three other rural districts in Texas also have temporarily closed some or all of their schools due to rising numbers of employees and students getting sick with COVID-19 or having to go into quarantine.

The surging Delta variant is causing a demand for nurses willing to take stints in hospitals with high needs throughout the United States, according to employment agencies that recruit them.

Aya Healthcare, one of the largest travel-nursing companies in the US, sends nurses to all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands. It serves 3,000 partnered healthcare facilities and says recent demand for clinicians has soared amid the Delta variant.

"We have nearly a 60 percent increase in job orders from what we saw in our biggest moment in the pandemic," Chrystal Fugett, vice-president of recruitment at Aya Healthcare, told China Daily. "At the beginning of July, we had slightly over 23,000 jobs. But now we have 51,000. So, our jobs have doubled in nearly a month and a half."

Belinda Robinson in New York contributed to this story.