The Shelby County Health Department issued a mask mandate Wednesday, effective 7 a.m. Friday, Aug. 20, for everyone age 2 and older, regardless of vaccination status.It applies to all indoor, public settings. Outdoor events will not require masking.
In less than 24 hours, hundreds of health care workers from across Tennessee, a preponderance from Memphis, have signed an open letter taking Gov. Bill Lee to task for making masking voluntary in K-12 schools. “As trained healthcare providers, we strongly oppose Governor Lee’s Executive Order,” said the letter, written by Dr. Erica Kaye at… Read More
To ease the medical staffing crunch, Gov. Bill Lee has twice lifted restrictions on who can provide patient care, including students in health care, retired staff, and doctors and nurses not licensed in Tennessee.Executive Order No. 83, issued Aug. 6, eased the restrictions again for these groups but did not ease supervisory restrictions on nurse… Read More
Every emergency room in Memphis is holding patients, often 24 hours or more, waiting for beds to open. Within days, the Memphis-Shelby County COVID-19 Task Force is expected to announce plans for how health care will proceed as the number of cases is expected to surpass last winter’s peak.
Across the Methodist Le Bonheur hospital system early Friday, Aug. 13, three ICU beds were available, a nerve-wracking statistic in a city where most emergency rooms are holding patients because beds are full.
The number of children sick with COVID at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital has more than doubled in a week. As of early Tuesday, Aug. 10, 17 children were hospitalized, including six in critical care. One was in the emergency room, waiting for a bed to open.
All but about 5% of the available rental housing in the Memphis medical district is occupied, according to figures kept by the Memphis Medical District Collaborative. The leaders of the MMDC say the high occupancy rate can be an incentive for landlords to raise rents but not necessarily to invest in those properties.
Memphis-area private schools are making decisions about how the 2021-22 school year will look amid rising cases of the Delta variant of COVID-19 and pediatric hospitals feeling its effects across the nation. Local private schools are implementing protocols at varying levels, some requiring universal masking and others leaving more choices in the hands of parents… Read More
