Owensboro Health Regional Hospital’s Experience with the COVID-19 Pandemic

According to the Center for Disease Control, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed on January 21st, 2020. The patient was a resident of Washington state who had returned from the city of Wuhan during the previous week. The virus quickly spread across the country, and our lives have yet to return to normal in the nineteen months since. Between the initial wave that began in early 2020, and the current wave from the Delta variant that is now ravaging the country once again, this virus has claimed the lives of over six hundred thousand people in the United states alone. The majority of news coverage has focused on the pandemic from a national or global perspective. And since major metropolitan areas are often hotspots for the spread of infectious diseases (with the spread of COVID-19 being no exception), smaller towns and cities have experienced incredible desolation of their own. While the global scale and impact of this tragedy is paramount, it is also important to consider the devastation that has been torn apart smaller - often rural - communities, and to remember people whose lives have been forever changed. When I moved back from Phoenix, Arizona to my hometown of Owensboro, Kentucky in June I had the opportunity to do just that: to see this pandemic through the lens of a tight-knit community, where there exists a feeling that everybody knows each other. I wondered whether or not Owensboro had experienced the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and June 2021 in the same way that was being portrayed by national news broadcasts. How did one city combat a nationwide pandemic?