On Monday, the staff of Bibb Medical Center, a 25-bed hospital in rural Centerville, set up what they are calling “the COVID room.”

No more than 150 square feet, the antiseptic, windowless space is directly across from a pair of automatic sliding doors leading straight out into the facility's back parking lot.

For the foreseeable future, anyone who arrives at the hospital with a fever, cough or sore throat will be directed to that back entrance, in hopes of reducing the chances of people infected with coronavirus spreading it throughout the facility. As of Tuesday morning, the room had not yet been put to use.

"We've got it all set up in the COVID room. They come in and we can question them from six feet away about their symptoms," Dr. Connie Richardson, an emergency physician and co-director of the medical center's emergency room, said Tuesday during a tour of the hospital.

“If we deem it necessary to do further testing on the patient, then we’ll don our personal protective equipment … and we’ll do the strep and flu tests and if they are negative then we’ll test them for COVID-19 if we still have tests.”

The center currently only has two coronavirus tests, but the hope is that more will become available soon. Because it takes several days to get the test results back, such patients will be sent home with albuterol inhalers, Mucinex and Tylenol and told to self-quarantine for two weeks.

The Bibb Medical Center Nursing Home, a 131-bed skilled nursing facility attached to the hospital, has already barred almost all visitors and visits to the hospital have been scaled back in order to help limit potential exposure.

Employees are now being screened for signs of illness upon entering any part of the facility, and gloves, masks and hand sanitizer are all ubiquitous within the entire center.

This is the current state of affairs in a small hospital in a rural Alabama county with zero confirmed COVID-19 cases that abuts multiple counties where people have tested positive for the virus.

While putting protocol in place to prevent coronavirus from spreading within the facility is perhaps the most immediate concern, Dr. John S. Meigs Jr., the hospital’s medical chief of staff, said Tuesday that he is already taking a long view of the crisis. One key concern, he said, is what to do if the medical center gets inundated with patients as the outbreak spreads, and what will happen if the bigger hospitals in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa where he usually sends critical patients don’t have space for them.

"We're a 25-bed hospital, but if I have 30 people come in who need a bed, where are those five going?" he said, noting that the hospital's emergency room already serves 1,000 to 1,500 per month and most of the hospital's beds are currently occupied by patients with other maladies.

"You hope that the other hospitals are not overwhelmed. If we've got someone here with coronavirus who's at risk of respiratory failure, we're going to send them out because we don’t have a ventilator. … If this coronavirus gets like it could – like Italy – that's going to be a big problem."

Richardson, who worked as a medical professional for the U.S. Air Force during the H1N1 outbreak a decade ago, said she believes it's "inevitable" that the medical center will receive coronavirus patients.

“There’s no cases yet, but it’s going to be here,” she said. “It’s coming.”

Hospital staffers have reviewed and adapted existing emergency preparation and pandemic plans and are rolling out preliminary measures. And the hospital has already begun taking steps to reduce strain on its limited resources.

Meigs said the hospital, which for many of its patients has filled in the gap left behind by the area’s shortage of primary care physicians, is doing more telephone screening and asking people to utilize “tele-health” offerings as much as possible. He also encouraged people not to come to the hospital for minor symptoms that could likely be addressed by a family doctor, leaving space in the hospital for patients who really need to be there.

“Normally if you call and you want an appointment, we’d say, ‘well come in at 10:00,’” Meigs said.

“Now we ask what’s going on. ‘Are you sick, is this routine?’ If it’s ‘I just wanted a check-up,’ we say, ‘Why don’t you come back in three months or after this has settled down if you’re doing alright now.’ … If they’re sick, we ask if they’re at risk, someone who needs to be tested for coronavirus or anything.”

But the most important thing anyone can do, Meigs reiterated, is ensure that people follow the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines for reducing the risk of spreading coronavirus.

“The way we’re going to make a difference on this thing is social distancing, self-isolation, hand-washing,” he said. “That social distancing – or dare I say, common sense – really may help flatten the curve.”