Reporting Trip: Athens Hospitals

As a part of my reporting on delaying routine medical care due to COVID concerns, I visited several healthcare facilities in Athens, GA to find out more about how busy they seem to be during the pandemic. I started my journey at Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center. You wouldn’t be able to tell that anything out of the ordinary was going on (besides everybody around being in masks). The parking areas were all full, people were walking in and out of the facility. The same thing seemed to be true at rival hospital St. Mary’s Hospital located just a mile away. I also visited several large doctors office facilities around Athens and they seemed to all be business as usual. The doctors complexes I visited were Piedmont’s Oconee Health Campus and St Mary’s 316 Health Complex. Mercy Health Center also seemed to be filled with people out and about.