On normal days, the garage is where people park while visiting Mississippi’s only children’s hospital, a building next door decorated with a logo of a rainbow and sun. Now air-conditioned tents with beds, monitors and oxygen fill the garage’s bottom floor.
By Wednesday, coronavirus patients will begin being treated in Mississippi’s second field hospital opened within days on the University of Mississippi Medical Center campus. It comes as the surging delta variant of COVID-19 has overwhelmed hospitals in a state with one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates.