Coronavirus rural hospital roundup: staffing shortages; providers plead with locals to take pandemic seriously

It's difficult to keep up with the deluge of news articles about rural hospitals' struggles with the pandemic. Here's a sampling of the most recent:

Amid a Covid-19 surge, a rural Mississippi hospital verges on full capacity. Read more here. 

North Carolina rural hospitals, seeing a Covid surge, plead with their communities to do its part in slowing the spread of the disease: Read more here.

The Department of Health and Human Services has posted hospital capacity data. Read more here. However, the data are questionable, says to a scientific investigation. Read more here.

As the virus spreads, a Kansas hospital runs out of staff. Read more here.

The pandemic is straining rural hospitals, where there's no Plan B. Read more here.

Rural nurses talk about what it's like to fight the pandemic in small health systems. Read more here.

States are paying to hire nurses for struggling hospitals. Read more here.

The pandemic ravages small rural hospitals, including this one in Missouri. Read more here.

Will rural hospitals have to return the money Congress gave them for the pandemic? Read more here.

As hospitals fill with Covid-19 patients, medical reinforcements are hard to find. Read more here.

NBC News reporter Dasha Burns shares in a Twitter thread what she saw and heard while spending three days with frontline workers in an Appalachian hospital. "Hospital staff say many in their hard-hit communities still don’t believe Covid is real. Misinformation is rampant," she writes. Read more here.

Appalachia's hospital closures are a slow-motion health-care emergency. Read more here.

With hospitals slammed by Covid-19, doctors and nurses plead for governors to act. Read more here.

The ripple effect of one rural Colorado doctor catching the coronavirus. Read more here.