> New York, home to the nation’s largest outbreak of Covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, is rushing to build a temporary hospital in a Manhattan conference center in the hope of staying ahead of the fast-spreading disease.
> Hospitals in parts of New York City have become so full of critically ill patients that they have steered ambulances elsewhere. The full-to-capacity morgue at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens is using a refrigerated truck to hold some of the dead. Thirteen people died in the hospital in the last 24 hours, said NYC Health + Hospitals, which operates Elmhurst.
Having some hospitals be full is not a system-wide breakdown. Even before COVID emergency rooms would be "on diversion" when particularly busy, and ambulances would go elsewhere.
It very much depends on the definition of breakdown. Some people see a breakdown if hospitals run out of beds, others will pretty much never accept there is a breakdown in health care because it’s contrary to their conviction that COVID-19 is ‘just a flu’. To be fair, it’s a continuum, there’s not going to be an easily agreed fine line between broken down and not broken down. So the real question is, what constitutes the health care system breaking down, and did that happen in NY.
Without agreement on that though, we’re just shouting at each other.
This is the first I’ve heard of this. If it’s true they were sending known-covid positive cases into nursing homes, whoever gave the order should be tried for mass murder.
More broadly it was a nationwide CDC advisory and not only that, the same shuffling of elderly infected back into nursing facilities happened in countries across the (mostly western) world. Probably based on shared implementations of policy briefing/ pandemic planning documents.
