COVID-19 hospitalizations are up 210 percent in Greene County, Mo., since June 1, CBS News reported June 23. Cases there have been largely driven by the highly transmissible delta variant.
Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Mo., has experienced an overfill of patients as a result. Craig McCoy, the hospital's president, told CBS it is "holding patients in the ER, waiting on admissions, waiting on discharges on any given day."
Nearly every COVID-19 patient hospitalized there is unvaccinated. Many have been in their mid-30s.
"We've only had two that have come in as in-patients that have been fully vaccinated," Mr. McCoy said.
As of June 23, Mercy Hospital in Springfield had 96 COVID-19 patients, a spokesperson told Becker's. That's up from 26 COVID-19 patients on June 1.
One of the admitted patients was less than 1 year old, the hospital's chief administrative officer said in a June 23 tweet.
"We have a COVID+ under 1 year of age [at Mercy Hospital Springfield]. My prayers are with this little one," Erik Frederick wrote in the tweet. "I hope as a community we can start to see the reality of this virus. It does not discriminate. It doesn't care what you think."
In Greene County, which includes Springfield, 32 percent of residents have been vaccinated. Genetic sequencing has shown about 90 percent of COVID-19 samples sequenced in the county are positive for the delta variant, CBS reports.