Corona Crisis: FEMA medical personnel bring relief to hospital in Coachella Valley

California, US: Medical staff at Eisenhower Health Hospital in Riverside County, California have welcomed extra resources from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

According to Dr. Alan Williamson, Chief Medical Officer at Eisenhower Health, 21 medical personnel from (FEMA) are now on duty, including respiratory technicians, doctors, physician assistants and nurses.

"It's a great help to us in many ways", Dr Williamson told on Monday, July 20. "If nothing else, just a great psychological boost to our staff who have been working really very, very hard to try to keep up with the patients and the growth in the number of patients that we're seeing. This is very physically and emotionally demanding work for them. And it's nice to see that we were able to bring out, bring in some outside resources in order to allow them to get just a breather and to recognize that the rest of the country, the rest of the world is in this fight together."

Riverside County has seen a surge in coronavirus hospitalizations, with 10 out of 17 hospitals reaching their ICU capacity. Dr. Williamson called on the public to continue adapting safety measures. "Our forecasts from our epidemiologists here would suggest that we, unfortunately still have quite a ways to go before we actually see the other side of this event," said Williamson. " But we would hope that the efforts of the press to really get out there, all of our local leaders to get the message out there to the public that we really need to get back to the basics that we were doing early on in the pandemic of really trying to stay at home as much as possible."

Riverside County is the twelfth most populous city in California and has registered the second highest number of cumulative cases and death in the state, trailing only behind Los Angeles County. "So we're talking about an increase in the number of patients, both here in Southern California as well as nationwide, has led to prolonged result times. And so, it's becoming routine that it requires quite a number of days before we get results for these tests. And that makes life a little bit difficult if you're having to try to quarantine people at home, particularly in some of our households and some areas of the valley where we have many families that live in multigenerational households. So you often have five, six, seven people of every generation that are living in the same household," said Dr. Williamson.