Florida hospital becoming overwhelmed by COVID-19 surge

Hospital staff in Florida say they are growing weary.

As the COVID-19 crisis continues to worsen across much of the South, hospital staff in Florida are growing weary and they say their patients are coming in younger and sicker than at any previous time during the pandemic. "The patients that we are seeing now are actually much younger than what we used to see in the initial [COVID-19] wave in January and February. The patients are much sicker," Dr. Hiren Mehta, a critical care physician at the University of Florida Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Florida, told ABC News. "They're staying on a ventilator longer, and they are in the intensive care unit for a much longer duration," he added. Jeremy Lusong, a nurse at the same hospital, told ABC News that she'd become frustrated because the majority of her patients hadn't been vaccinated.