“We’re facing a national emergency,” said Rick Pollack, CEO of the American Hospital Association.

“Just think about it: when America shut down, our folks stepped up and they continued to do that,” Pollack told Axios. “And for two years now, they’ve been going absolutely full throttle.”

In Kentucky, officials say hospitals have been so overrun in recent months, there have been days hospitals haven’t had the bandwidth to help incoming patients, or even find places to transfer them.

Describing one particularly tough day, one chief medical officer in the state told Bloomberg : “Five people died that day and that’s what saved us.”