Officials at one of the hardest-hit rural hospitals in Kansas during the COVID-19 pandemic have started to catch their breath after hitting a peak of cases earlier in the month. Southwest Medical Center in Seward County had prepared for as many as 22 patients. It hit that number between May 3-4, necessitating a Blackhawk helicopter to deliver an emergency shipment of ventilators to the hospital. The number of cases was the maximum the hospital had resources to treat and was a couple more cases than the much larger Ascension Via Christi in Wichita saw at its peak in the middle of April. Besides a significant cluster of cases at a meatpacking facility in its own town of Liberal, the hospital also took patients from a cluster at a meatpacking operation 45 minutes away in Oklahoma. The 101-bed facility also had COVID-19 patients from Texas, according to Robin Allaman, Southwest’s vice president of patient care services.
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