The New York Times reports today from Great Falls, Montana, population 58,434. The story by Lucy Tompkins, Maura Turcotte and Libby Seline is headlined "'I Just Kind of Lost It’: As Coronavirus Cases Soar, One Montana Town Reels." Here's the lede:
For months, the jail in central Montana’s Cascade County was free of the coronavirus, which seemed as distant a threat as it did in much of the nation’s rural Mountain West.
Then a few people who had the virus were arrested. By the time Paul Krogue, the jail’s medical director, realized there was a problem, nearly 50 inmates were infected in the jail, where some had been sleeping on mats on an overcrowded floor. After several weeks, Mr. Krogue got a call that infections were spreading to a side of the jail that had been virus-free.
He hung up the phone and put his head in his hands.
“I just kind of lost it, like, ‘My God, I don’t know how much longer I can do this,’” Mr. Krogue, a nurse practitioner, recalled. “I was just scared that I’m not going to be able to see it through, that I’m going to get sick — you just feel so exhausted and it’s just a lot.”
Montana, along with neighboring North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, and Wyoming, is suffering the highest infection rates in the country right now.
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