 In a video released by Pikeville Medical Center Friday, a town hall form was held to discuss possible action against rising cases of COVID-19. Out of the hour long form, Dr. John Fleming and others discussed hospital occupancy and how operations may change under load. This increasing cases, for now yes, but we're seeing increasing wait times for people to get into the emergency department and increasing times for them to get out of the emergency department because we have a backlog of patients and a backlog of patients to get into the hospital or transferred out or elsewhere. Other questions addressed during the form or ER differences between now and the last COVID surge. Before the 1st of August, I don't recall the last COVID positive test I had. I'm getting personally 5 to 10 a day just in the patients that I see. We see that these are younger and healthier patients who are now sicker and requiring admission. In the last week, I've admitted multiple COVID patients to the hospital. None of them have been vaccinated. I have not seen a positive COVID test in a vaccinated patient yet this week. During the form, Dr. Aaron Crum spoke about elective procedures and how they may change. Well, the answer is we already have stopped some elective procedures and that's not just us. That is, that's the theme across the state right now. And we've stopped elective procedures that will require admission at this moment. And the reason that we do that is we need those beds and we need that staff availability to be able to take care of the patients that we're admitting right now. The next step will come in if we find ourselves in a situation where we need more staff to provide ancillary duties where we have to take those workers from the operating room and have them on the floors, or if we get in a situation where we need stuff like PPE again. We don't predict that that part is going to happen, but it's possible. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Forgell.