Billings clinic billings mt1/24/2024 ![]() What’s different from the early scenes of the pandemic is the public’s response. Last week, the county had 2,329 active cases, more than the next two counties combined. The state announced 1,209 new cases on Friday, and Yellowstone County, home to Billings Clinic, is seeing the worst of it. But now Montana is a national hot spot for covid infections, recording the highest percentage increase in new cases over the past seven days. The situation has played out in hospitals around the nation since 2020. “I do feel a little hopeless,” said Christy Baxter, the hospital’s director of critical care. In the past week, 14 people have died of covid here, the state’s largest hospital. The hospital’s morgue cart arrived at the ICU - as it frequently has these days - then the room was sterilized, another patient took the man’s place, and the cycle began again. He was dead, at age 24, by Sunday morning. Visitors generally aren’t permitted in these rooms, but the man’s mother comes most days to gaze through a glass window for the allowed 15 minutes. They have covid-19 - the vast majority unvaccinated against the virus, the hospital says. He is among other patients, room after room of them, with the same grim tubes inserted down their throats. The man has been a patient at Billings Clinic for nearly a month, most of that time in the hospital’s intensive care unit. The dark lesions are insignificant given his current state, but she continues just the same, gently, soothingly, appearing to whisper to him as she works. Lying on his stomach all those hours has produced sores on his face, and one nurse dabs at the wounds. ![]() The ventilator forcing air into him is most effective when he’s on his stomach, so he is in that position most hours of the day, sedated and paralyzed by drugs. Nurses fill the hospital room to turn a patient from his stomach to his back.
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