Georgia National Guard deployed to help hospitals fight Covid surge

More than 100 National Guard medical staff will assist some of the state’s hardest-hit hospitals as cases surge

The governor of Georgia has deployed the National Guard to hospitals in an attempt to curb the state’s increasingly dire Covid crisis.

“These guardsmen will assist our frontline healthcare workers as they provide quality medical care during the current increase in cases and hospitalizations,” Governor Brian Kemp said in a press release on Tuesday.

“This Georgia National Guard mission is in addition to the 2,800 state-supported staff and 450 new beds brought online I announced last week, at a total state investment of $625 million through December of this year. I continue to urge all Georgians to talk to a medical professional about getting vaccinated.”

The 105 trained medical staff were deployed to hospitals in cities across the state including Atlanta, Macon, Marietta and Savannah, the release said. Their deployment was coordinated with the Georgia Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Community Health, and will deploy 105 personnel to hospitals throughout the state.

Georgia – and the wider South – has been dealing with a major surge in cases amid the aggressive spread of the Delta variant and reluctance of its residents to get vaccinated.

According to the nonprofit USAFacts, roughly 40 per cent of Georgia’s adult population has been fully vaccinated and 49 per cent has received one dose.

That’s well below the national average of more than 70 per cent of adults who’ve received at last one shot.

According to The New York Times, Georgia has seen a 58 per cent increase in Covid cases over the past two weeks and is averaging more than 8,000 new cases per day.

“From our standpoint, the biggest contributor is the spread of the virus in the unvaccinated population in the community,” John Delzell, a physician at the Northeast Georgia Hospital System, said, according to WSBTV.

Major General Thomas Carden told the station that the National Guard deployment would be “as long as it needs to be”.

“The first groups we are sending out are medics; some are doctors.”

One Georgia hospital told the station that it was “over capacity, our emergency room is at critical mass ... the guard personnel is a much-needed additional resource.”