Milwaukee Mayor: ICUs ‘Are Getting Near Capacity in the State of Wisconsin’

EXCERPT:

BERMAN: "How are your hospitals? What's capacity like in the ICUs?"
BARRETT: "ICU capacities, as you noted in your lead-in, are getting near capacity in the state of Wisconsin. And over the past week, for the first time, we've accepted patients at our alternative care facility. This is a facility we built earlier this year, hoping that it would serve only as an insurance policy and we would never have to use it. There are now approximately six patients in that alternative care facility. Our concern is particularly in the Fox River Valley, in the northeastern and northern part of the states, we are seeing huge, huge numbers and that we're going to have more patients. But that's why it was built. We wanted to have that capacity there. But, clearly, politics has just permeated this in a way that I think has made it very, very difficult for us to deal with this. We have mixed messages coming where the legislative leads, the Republican legislative leaders are saying, well, these mask mandates should be local or that we don't want them and they filed a brief in support of the lawsuit trying to strike down the mask orders. And so at a time when we needed to take politics out of this, they have decided that that was the route they wanted to take, and I think it's having dire consequences."