Baptist Health Corbin officials react to temporary closing of surgery department

CORBIN, Ky. (WYMT) - In his 24-year career working as Baptist Health Corbin President and Chief Executive Officer, Anthony Powers is disheartened by the grim reality that is taking place during this Delta variant surge.

“Neither one of us have ever seen anything like this. It is by far the worst,” Powers said. “It’s way worse than the first wave that we had and worse than anything we’ve ever seen.”

Officials said that they are temporarily shutting down the hospital’s surgery department as there are no available beds left.

“They would really like to go ahead and get that surgery done which is in the best interest of the patient,” Powers said. “But we’re just not able to accommodate that, as a lot of the hospitals around us, we just continue to try to fight this COVID surge.”

Powers dais that the number of positive COVID-19 cases is at an all-time high, increasing almost daily.

“This morning at 72 positive patients in-house,” Powers said. “We continue to see about 75 to 80 positive patients come through our out-patient testing center and our emergency department daily.”

For those waiting on scheduled surgeries, Powers assured them of one thing.

“As soon as we do open back up, we’re going to be able to ramp up and do even more surgeries,” Powers said. “So hopefully over the next couple weeks after we get opened back up, we’ll get everybody through the pipeline. We’re going to run extra long and extra crews as soon as the surge starts on the downside.”

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