Some Good News from the Nation’s Hospitals.

Some Good News from the Nation’s Hospitals. By JIM GERAGHTY

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/some-good-news-from-the-nations-hospitals/

Excerpt: Let’s begin today with the best possible news: As of this writing, it appears that the vast majority, if not all, of the states and localities in the United States have expanded their hospital capacity in excess of what is current expected to be needed for the coronavirus outbreak. Reuters offers this surprising figure: “New York, which ramped up its hospital bed capacity to around 90,000, has had only about 18,000 patients hospitalized for the past several days.” Before everyone jumps on the “ah-HA! This outbreak wasn’t as those eggheads said it was going to be” train, keep in mind that the death toll in New York state is now beyond 10,000 people, and for a while, some New York City hospitals indeed received more patients than they could handle. Physician Helen Ouyang writes a first-person essay in the New York Times about the worst moments at one city hospital: "I happened to have been assigned to work at one hospital for a chain of shifts, so I hadn’t been inside one of our other hospitals in over a week. As soon as I open the E.R. doors there, I shrink from the sights and smells. Patients are now triple-bunked into single-person spaces, curtains pushed aside. In one room, three men, who appear to be in their 80s or so, are side by side in their stretchers, each one pulling at his oxygen mask, confused, their frail limbs swinging in the air. Some have sat in their own feces for a day. Puddles of urine have pooled around the wheels of some patients’ stretchers. Nurses are out sick; the remaining ones are coping the best they can. I have gotten texts from colleagues about the chaos here, but I thought that those were just about one bad day, that they had already gone through the worst." The bad news is that the nightmare scenario did strike certain hospitals for several days. But the good news is that, at least for now, these facilities don’t seem overwhelmed anymore. Generally, New York City hospitals are now finding the pace of incoming patients manageable — not easy, but manageable: