Alabama hospitals are overwhelmed and things are about to get even worse.

Mobile, Alabama last week had no ambulances. Doctors are doing CPR in the back of pickup trucks.

Dr. David Kimberlin is a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He spoke to NPR last week.

The ambulances when they do finally are able to pick somebody up. They take them and they either have to park them outside the emergency room

and the ambulance stays tied up because the patient is on the stretcher in the ambulance. No where to go inside.

Or sometimes if the patient is well enough, they'll put them in a chair like a folding chair outside the emergency room and leave them there.

In Alabama, there are just under 3,000 COVID patients in hospitals across the state.

And by one projection from the University of Alabama at Birmingham over the next three to four weeks, that number will grow to more than 5,000 patients.

That means the wait for an ambulance will get even longer. Space in the emergency room, even more scarce.

Healthcare workers even more exhausted.

Our system in Alabama and I use this word deliberately and carefully. It is nearing collapse.

And I truly cannot overemphasize how terrible things are right now. And that's with almost 2,800 in the hospital with a projection to go over 5,000.

It is so unprecedented that I honestly don't know what it looks like on the other side of this.

Consider this. Hospitals are buckling in a handful of low-vaccine states and the Delta surge may not have peaked yet.

From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, September 2nd.

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Over this last year and a half, the world's been through a lot. So on this season of the Storycore Podcast, we'll hear stories reminding us that even when times are hard, we can still begin again. Listen to our new season wherever you get your podcasts.

It's considered this from NPR. So let's compare how hospitals are doing now with how they were doing in the worst days of the winter surge.

This was back in early January. Across the country, there were around 120,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19.

That number fell throughout the spring and summer to a low of just 12,000 people in early July. But it soared back up over the past two months. And this week, according to the latest data from the CDC, it's around 90,000.

Nearly 100 people are sitting in emergency rooms across Mississippi waiting for an ICU bed that is not available.

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