
U.S. field hospitals stand down, most without treating any Covid-19 patients - hhs
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients
======
kindatrue
Something the article doesn't do a great job of covering is how overall
emergency medical incidents went way down more than expected - which is what
some of these field hospitals (and the Navy ships) were for.

The head of a local hospital network has tweeted wondering where all the heart
attack and stroke patients went - both in my lightly impacted region and in
disaster NYC. Did the rate go down? Or did people just die at home afraid to
go to the hospital?

In SF in normal times, over 50% of trauma cases are from car accidents. My
completely unscientific theory is that commuting/traffic is way more stressful
and physically taxing than people think.

[https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/half-of-injuries-treated-
at-...](https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/half-of-injuries-treated-at-sf-
general-hospital-are-from-traffic-collisions/)

~~~
tathougies
> The head of a local hospital network has tweeted wondering where all the
> heart attack and stroke patients went - both in my lightly impacted region
> and in disaster NYC. Did the rate go down? Or did people just die at home
> afraid to go to the hospital?

It's at this point that the news media needs to look inwards and wonder if
they made such a big hysteria over covid that they failed to point out that
people should still go to the ER. I bet many of those who died at home had
symptoms of heart attacks/strokes, etc, but didn't want to go out of a
mistaken sense of magnanimity (I don't want to take the bed of a COVID
patient) as well as a false sense that the hospitals were in any danger of
being overloaded (they were not, given the steps we took).

~~~
dboreham
Where did you see media hysteria? Somehow that didn't enter my bubble.

~~~
pensatoio
I hate to say it, but almost all major news outlets have been hysterical about
this for the past several months.

~~~
inpdx
By that definition of hysterical I'm pretty sure the media were hysterical
during WWII as well.

~~~
mjburgess
risk of death from c19 is, in all age groups, the same-or-lower than the
general risk of death, ie., trivial.

The mean age of death from c19 is 80, and even in this group they die at a
rate of 1%/wk _anyway_ , for which c19 is about as deadly.

This isnt WWII

~~~
SomeoneFromCA
You are wrong because - a) Risk of death among the sickest and weakest is way
higher than the "normal", across all age groups. b) We do not know much about
the virus. It appears to have strange trait of being more deadly if initial
exposure was higher. In Russia, for example ~7% (!) of all Covid deaths are
deaths of medical workers, many of them are relatively young and apparently
healthy. c) We also do not know what are long term consequences of the
disease, even if you survived it just fine.

~~~
mjburgess
Nothing here you've said is true.

The background rate of death in this "sickest and weakest" group is already
high. C19 is no higher.

Please do some research, there's an article on the BBC with a graph
demonstrating this point.

------
krallja
The good news: we flattened the curve enough that most of these field
hospitals weren’t needed.

The bad news: bureaucracy and mismanagement prevented hospitals who did need
more space from using them.

The awful news: NY recommended people to stay home from the hospital even if
they needed care, probably causing extra deaths and complications.

~~~
malandrew
I'm unsure why IG_Semmelweiss sibling comment is dead and why I can't vouch or
reply to it, but even NPR is reporting on the exact same phenomena:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2020/05/06/8504549...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2020/05/06/850454989/eerie-emptiness-of-ers-worries-doctors-where-are-
the-heart-attacks-and-strokes)

This concerns me because my dad has congestive heart failure and can't get
proper medical support right now.

What we should be doing is segregating hospitals, keeping some focused on
COVID and others focused on non-COVID medical emergencies.

~~~
the-dude
Click the timestamp.

~~~
malandrew
That's what I did. Vouch didn't work nor was there a reply link.

~~~
zaroth
Just worked for me.

------
sandworm101
So I saw, am still seeing, all the doctors and nurses in NYC pleading for
help. But there were thousands of empty covid-specific beds open in that
state. Why where they not sending patients to these field hospitals? Is this
about money? Would private hospitals loose out on payments if they transfered
patients?

I feel sorry for the frontline workers in NYC, but I don't know how to
reconcile knowledge that there were open covid-specific beds availible just
down the road.

~~~
twic
> But there were thousands of empty covid-specific beds open in that state.
> Why where they not sending patients to these field hospitals?

There is a somewhat similar situation in the UK, where hospitals are dealing
with a lot of COVID patients, but the 'Nightingale' hospitals, our equivalent
of these field hospitals, are mostly empty.

Something i have heard, but do not have a source for, is that the Nightingale
hospitals were built on the assumption that COVID patients just needed a bed
and a ventilator, but it turns out that COVID causes multiple organ failure,
treating which needs a wider range of facilities, and can progress very
quickly from respiratory symptoms to that, so they aren't actually much use.

~~~
ryankemper
> but it turns out that COVID causes multiple organ failure, treating which
> needs a wider range of facilities, and can progress very quickly from
> respiratory symptoms to that, so they aren't actually much use.

Just to be clear, COVID-19 contributes to organ failure in very limited cases
from a statistical sense. So this is absolutely something that is happening,
but just wanted to be clear that we are not seeing hordes of people keeling
over from strokes, organ failure, etc.

It's known that the complications that come into play when the body has
entered a cytokine-storm type state are very far-reaching. For the same reason
that inflammation is a critical part of the healing process, systemic
inflammation can cause incredible damage to organs and other physiological
systems.

~~~
humaniania
Do you have a reference for those assertions?

~~~
ryankemper
The burden of proof is on the person claiming the widespread organ failure. I
can't provide a study saying it doesn't happen because there's not studies
saying it does happen for those studies to debunk :)

But, here's one group of case reports that is commonly held up as evidence of
the supposed strokes in young people / widespread organ failure / etc:

"Large-Vessel Stroke as a Presenting Feature of Covid-19 in the Young" \-
[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787?query=rec...](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787?query=recirc_mostViewed_railB_article)

EDIT: Oh, or were you referring to sources around the impacts of systemic
inflammation? I can certainly provide those if you're interested.

------
ashtonkem
Building a field hospital for a pandemic and not needing it is literally dead
last in my list of wasteful government expenditures to be angry about. The
rationale that lead to making the hospital was incredibly clear, and that we
didn’t need said hospital is a source of relief more than anything else.

~~~
Loughla
The problem is much media, and especially social media, is using things like
these unused field hospitals to justify that the problem was never that bad to
begin with.

Which is exactly what people said would happen if stay-home orders managed to
flatten the curve.

I hate this all so much. I am honestly super depressed about how short-sighted
many people I know are proving to be.

~~~
clairity
or, you could be angry that it became highly politicized and many media
outlets absolutely overhyped the danger for clicks and political points.

if we'd been more levelheaded, we would have suggested the public should
_either_

1) physically distance, or

2) wear a mask

 _in enclosed spaces and face-to-face situations_.

if you're an essential worker or particularly vulnerable, you'd do both where
possible. that's it. that likely would have provided all the risk reduction we
needed to get the spread under control.

the message would have been simple, the effects likely as good, and we
wouldn't have left a hundred million poeple on the edge of (or in) economic
and psychological collapse.

but that doesn't punch the emotional and neurochemical pathways the way
politicians and news peddlers want.

~~~
new2628
TBH, even if it was an overreaction, the effects were by and large positive,
regardless of the pandemic. Work from home, less traffic, more family time,
slowdown of economy, pausing of a lot of wasteful, useless activity. I really
enjoyed walking around with almost no cars on the roads and listening to
birds.

~~~
orangecat
_the effects were by and large positive, regardless of the pandemic_

I generally hate the phrase "check your privilege", but in this case it fits
perfectly.

~~~
new2628
It fits perfectly if by privilege you mean not pursuing a career with high
intensity and instead living a frugal, simple life that is less affected by a
slowdown of the global economy.

~~~
ashtonkem
That’s only true if you pretend that service workers don’t exist.

------
someonehere
I have a really good friend who works for one of the bigger hospital networks
in Michigan. He says they are fortunate to have jobs because even though their
hospitals are all empty. He told me staff isn’t being let go or furloughed for
now but the staff spends their shift walking around and cleaning things. Even
without rooms and equipment being used. Just to stay busy.

~~~
eiji
My wife is an operating room circulating nurse at Beaumont in Michigan (Metro
Detroit). Lots of people without the title of nurse (RN) are furloughed or
laid off. Entire hospitals are closed and covid19 patients transferred to
other hospitals. Cleaning and supporting staff has been cut down to bare
minimums to save costs. She is being sent home early most days due to low
volume, impacting her pay too.

She worked covid19 ER shifts receiving walk in patients coughing like hell.
That dried up a month ago and she had the choice to stay home or work night
shifts on the floor medicating and caring exclusively for covid19 patience. So
she did night shifts for two weeks. Now she is back on her regular position,
underemployed.

She laughed about the field hospitals. Now, here in Michigan, we are all,
including Nurses and hospitals, sitting around most of the day doing nothing
and waiting for some miracle.

There was never a capacity issue she knows of. Only shortages of PPE.

~~~
taurath
That is really interesting data. I'd think that Detroit in particular would be
fairly hard hit given 1150 deaths there since April.

Beaumont has their own stat sheet which is interesting:
[https://www.beaumont.org/health-
wellness/coronavirus](https://www.beaumont.org/health-wellness/coronavirus)

To me it appears that the quarentine was effective? Look at the chart above -
on March 21st the stay at home order went into effect in michigan. They peaked
2 weeks later at 1200 active cases in the hospital. Now its dropped back to
the same amount as just before the stay at home order went into effect.

Underemployed seems like... a good position to be in right now, no?

~~~
eiji
Depends on the way you look at this, and what your politics are.

Underemployed hospitals means a lot of procedures are not happening right now.
Lots of chemo and similar things. Those will be facing long waiting lists once
the state opens back up. If you even get those patients to come back in the
next months. I think the risks are somewhat distorted. If you are skipping
chemo because you are scared of Covid19, you may be missing something. And
yes, chemo was deemed not essential as far as I can tell. I think they call
those excess deaths, and it's very hard to say how those will shape up.

From a resident perspective, I see a flat curve with plenty of capacity, even
of ventilators, and still a closed up state. But that's getting us into
politics. The governor is following a timeline of opening up to normal maybe
within 4-6 month. As long as sections are closed up, you need to sustain
comfortable unemployment benefits to keep people even halfway in line to play
along. Soon the money for that will run dry. It seems like she can extend
stay-at-home orders without democratic agreement, but once the money runs dry,
she cannot make a budget by herself. So things will get ugly eventually.

------
nojito
Field Hospitals are designed for Trauma patients. They were never designed to
handle infectious disease case loads.

The plan was to help take on non-covid case load from primary hospitals in the
region that they were deployed to.

~~~
ilikehurdles
Surprised to see this comment come so late. It's true. The regular hospitals
were hotbeds for covid infections, so it made sense to keep the non-covid
patients as separate as possible from the covid ones. Hence, the field
hospitals. It would be terrible to come into the hospital with a broken bone
and come out of it with the virus. It makes sense to avoid transporting
infected patients whenever possible because it could lead to a new outbreak in
a different location.

~~~
lastres0rt
The kicker is that in order to be transferred to the non-covid hospitals, you
still had to be TESTED for covid and come up negative.

THAT'S why these hospitals were all empty in the first place. It all comes
back to what a shitshow testing is in this country.

------
dv_dt
The Navy hospital ship in LA was planned as a reserve for serious non-covid
cases. I think because of the early statewide action we didn't need it, but
better to plan reserves than to fall short.

In any large complex system, you can't necessarily predict the bottlenecks,
but if you want the system to guarantee a high capacity to handle issues, you
need to broadly overresrouce the initial layout (esp if the resources take
time to line up). This means by definition - even a good plan will have idle
resources somewhere.

------
mensetmanusman
Fear of covid killing more than covid? Happening in Australia apparently.

Sociologists are learning a lot from this situation

~~~
xoxoy
It’s governments overreacting not the people. I haven’t met a single person
who is actually “scared.”

~~~
astronautjones
People should be scared. This isn't over, and this idiotic preemptive
celebration/busines reopening is going to render a lot of our sacrifices in
vain.

~~~
xoxoy
Seems a bit hyperbolic to me. All signs point to greater spread than
previously known in places like NYC, meaning majority of people who had it
either had no symptoms or extremely mild symptoms and didn’t even notice.

~~~
taurath
I'm in the camp that a disease that has 80,000 people dead is not a hyperbolic
thing to be afraid of. I have a good friend who is a nurse who still doesn't
have enough PPE to protect herself, gets tested constantly and has colleagues
who are in the ICU right now.

I also agree with you that its probably a lot more prevalent. We already know
that its possible to have no symptoms. But that doesn't take away that for
many people it is actually a horrible virus that has killed huge amounts of
people and we have no idea how prevalent it actually is because we can't do
community testing yet. If you're wrong many more people die.

~~~
umvi
> If you're wrong many more people die.

Can we stop the subtle browbeating please? People are going to die either way
that normally would not have died.

~~~
taurath
I'm honestly not sure how to say it. What we do about the pandemic determines
whether people live or die.

I'm not at all trying to intimidate the person - I'm just reminding that the
stakes here are pretty high and any direction we go (continued lockdown,
gradual opening, sudden opening) has an effect on how many people will
ultimately die.

Not even to say that human life is that sacred - almost any society if they're
honest clearly don't act according to that principle. The parent poster said
that government is overreacting to the problem and that he's not met anyone
who's scared, and then said fear over early reopening causing a 2nd wave is
hyperbolic.

This is a lot of people that are already dead - I'm making a rhetorical
argument that its absolutely not hyperbolic to consider the possibility that
the cases and deaths could ramp upwards sharply.

------
RobLach
Great use of money and commendations across the board to the Army Corp of
Engineers who put this together so quickly.

$690m is bargain for putting a ceiling on the situations these would have been
necessary for.

------
yufeng66
The idea of field hospital is to move non covid related patients to the file
hospitals and let the regular hospital to be covid only. This way there is
much smaller chance to get covid while getting routine medical care. Reliable
source told me medical facility utilization rates aredown more than 50% in non
covid hot spot area. People are simply deferring non emergency medical
service. They are also not so sure if they need to quarantine non symptomatic
covid case away from home, like china did. So the field hospitals are built as
an option if needed.

~~~
taurath
Its not that people are deferring medical service, they are being deferred. I
have a friend who needs brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor, and its
deferred until non-emergency surgeries can open up.

~~~
astronautjones
Lots of people that just lost their jobs & insurance (and can't afford COBRA)
are deferring medical service.

------
bwb
Please don't shut these down, we might need them eventually. This is only
inning 1 of the next 2 to 3 years.

~~~
Jommi
Well not sure hurting them down is the only other option anyways. Tho 2-3
years sounds way overexaggerating

~~~
bwb
I am curious, where do you think Covid is going to go :)?

Social distancing will get us to less than R1, but then once we open back up
it looks like it will grow past R1. It is going to be here until we get a
vaccine or herd immunity.

~~~
Jommi
Do you mean where the virus is going to go, or where this situation will go?

Yes, most likely it will not get burnt out in the US until we have vaccine,
herd immunity or the 3rd option, which is coalition/state/county level
containment.

My comment reflected on the subject of these emergency field hospitals. Its A)
not efficient to keep these up for the time being B) its unlikely we will be
caught underestimating the virus the 2nd/3rd/xth time around.

And something else to just reiterate. There are multiple steps between
"keeping the field hospitals operational" and "shutting them down". Just like
there are multiple steps between "social distancing" and "opening back up". :)

~~~
bwb
Gotcha. I was worried you thought Covid might just disappear or something
magically :)

Efficiency is not always the goal in situations like this. It might be wiser
for them to be inefficient but prepared, and keep the hospitals up and
running. Especially if they have to nationalize the entire health care system
to prevent a collapse (even if its temporary).

------
Ididntdothis
I think it’s pretty clear that a lot of things have been going wrong in this
effort and there was probably a lot of waste. This is to be expected when it’s
required to act quickly with lack of good data.

I only hope the political systems will allow a serious retrospective of the
measures and learning from that. I am very afraid that the partisans and
conspiracy theorists will take over soon and no rational decisions for the
future will be made so we will stay unprepared for the next pandemic.

------
jijji
After speaking with a few doctors who worked setting up these hospitals, it
was almost like a parade or a show rather than anything serious. The doctors
who worked there were ready to take on the patients, but the decisions came
from the top not to allow it to happen...

------
tehjoker
I guess it's true that hospital utilization for non-COVID cases declined, but
in NYC hospitals, they were still stuffing people in the hallways while these
sites idled. Is that not a scandal? Some contractors made a lot of money
building these sites. Did the people building them know before-hand that they
didn't fulfill the list of features for actual utilization when they signed
the contracts that were evaluated under an accelerated, non-competitive
review?

I don't want to diminish the efforts of the people that built these sites and
stood ready to treat patients. That's heroic. My skepticism is aimed at the
bosses.

------
outside1234
So, in other words, we were successful in preventing this from becoming a
disaster.

~~~
djsumdog
or .. the numbers were wrong and we never needed half these facilities, or to
bring the world economy to a grinding halt. Our European counterparts are
probably fine, but low-income Americans have lost a lot.. more than we can
repay.

~~~
esoterica
The lockdown isn't causing the economic crisis, the pandemic is. The economy
would grind to a halt anyway without lockdown measures if the pandemic were
spreading unchecked and a million [1] people were dying in the space of a few
months. Everyone would be barricading themselves in their homes and not going
out to restaurants and movie theaters.

[1] (70% infected to get herd immunity * 0.5% fatality rate * 330 million
people = >1 million people).

~~~
wilburTheDog
I think that until we get everyone tested we aren't going to know the real
fatality rate. Some portion of people, perhaps larger than we expect,
experience this virus as a cold that passes normally. Some people never even
realize they have it. Until we have tested everyone and know for sure how many
people have it asymptomatically that fatality rate is likely an overestimate
and we can't really know by how much.

~~~
esoterica
The 0.5% estimate is based on seroprevalence studies (which take into account
the asymptomatic infected). The crude case fatality rate is more like 5%,
which is definitely an overestimate.

Also >0.2% of NYC has already died, so it's not possible for the fatality rate
to be substantially below 0.5%.

~~~
mikeyouse
Not sure why you're so heavily downvoted but if you took the total deaths
across NYC and divided by the entire population of NYC, you get a strict lower
bound IFR of 0.14% which makes this at least 3x deadlier than the flu. If you
figure more like 1/5 of NYC has been infected, your IFR is more like 18x as
deadly as the flu.

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.22.20076026v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.22.20076026v1)

------
solarengineer
“ The plan was for the Javits Center to take patients from overwhelmed
hospitals in the city. But in practice it wasn't that easy. Some hospitals
complained that the intake process was too complicated. And they sent few
patients to Javits — even as they resorted to treating patients in the
hallways”

What does it mean for an intake process to be complicated? Isn’t it straight
forward like loading the patient + printouts of medical records into an
ambulance, driving to the new place, and then transferring them into a bed?

------
mirimir
FYI: [https://www.wbur.org/npr/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-
stand...](https://www.wbur.org/npr/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-
most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients)

------
pwinnski
This is great news! "Shelter in place" orders flattened the curve as was
predicted and as we hoped. We were ready (mostly) for the worst case, and
people complying with these orders meant we never hit it.

Next up, I hope we don't end up needing these field hospitals because of
states re-opening things too soon.

~~~
nck4222
That's not what the article said. It was highlighting how despite some
hospitals being overrun, these field hospitals still went unused because there
were no plans in place to utilize them.

We didn't flatten the curve enough to make these hospitals useless. We simply
didn't use them despite needing them.

~~~
musingsole
That's a gracious reading. If there had been an absolute need for more beds,
plans would have been developed to make use of the space.

Instead, it might imply hospitals were dealing with increased load, perhaps
needing more beds than they had but not so much of an increased load to
justify implementing and following a plan to use these facilities.

------
urda
Yeah I'm totally OK with this. Medical facilities aren't exactly "autoscale",
and by the time you change your mind it's already too late.

It's great to hear they weren't used heavily. It was great that they were set
up too.

------
jefftk
The article is presenting this as some sort of scandal, that we spent a lot of
money to urgently build things that we didn't end up needing. This way of
thinking about things is why we are generally not well prepared for unlikely
disasters: most work you put in will not be needed.

Instead we should see this as really positive: we were working to make sure
that if stay-at-home (which has cost _far_ more than $600M) didn't work we
would have space to treat people, and then we kept the infections low enough
that we didn't need to use it.

~~~
undersuit
I think the article takes a very balanced stance. It is pointed out multiple
times the that people are glad the hospitals are mostly unused, that they now
exist if there is a surge, and that the excess bed capacity is very helpful
during a crisis like this. The real criticism is nothing like you've
paraphrased.

> They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds,
> but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field
> hospitals could be put to use once they were finished.

>The Army Corps limited the competition in awarding the projects to speed the
process, which usually takes six to nine months, according to agency
documents. Officials noted they were able to complete the contract award for
the Stony Brook project in a "little more than three days."

>The two Long Island field hospitals were completed in late April. They never
opened to the public and didn't treat any patients.

>The plan was for the Javits Center to take patients from overwhelmed
hospitals in the city. But in practice it wasn't that easy. Some hospitals
complained that the intake process was too complicated. And they sent few
patients to Javits — even as they resorted to treating patients in the
hallways.

Seemingly like all of the US coronavirus reactions we dragged our feet at
multiple points, had no reliable central coordination, and large sums of money
was made against the backdrop of human suffering.

~~~
gambler
_> I think the article takes a very balanced stance._

Not really. It just does the usual cowardly trick of complaining about
something by selectively citing cherry-picked experts. Rather than this quote
salad I'd very much prefer honest, direct criticism where the outlet or the
authors make it clear what is their stance and why.

 _That_ is the responsible thing to do. It wouldn't present opinion as news
(as is the case with this article) and it would give a better opportunity for
people to respond to criticism.

~~~
IggleSniggle
I prefer outlets that do their very best to attempt to remain impartial and
present a "just the facts and all the facts please" view, even if we all know
it's not 100% achievable.

I agree with you, this article is not that. If you listen to any economist,
healthcare provider, or logistics expert, they will all tell you that this was
the prudent choice given the worst-case tail scenario, and that this resource
is one that has continuing value for some time.

But this article takes all that information and manages to paint that
information in a negative light. It is "an opinion of the author" piece that
even manages to express the opposite opinion FROM the expert opinions it
reports.

------
jpollock
A late reaction typically requires overcompensation and wasted resources
because you don't have sufficient positive control to tell where things are
headed.

That leads to overcorrection and lots of cost.

------
ridewinter
It's incredible the amount of unknowns even at this point in the epidemic.
Anyone who claims to understand what's going on is just frontin. That's my big
takeaway so far.

------
acokeaday
Biggest scam in the history of the world! And like good little sheep we fell
and are still falling for this bullshit!!! For a country that supposedly holds
personal freedom in high esteem... it’s so fucking pitiful the powers that be
must be laughing all the way to their new powers and wealth, almost
disappointed how easy it was.

------
abduhl
I’m sorry, but is anyone else getting a real “this is good for bitcoin” vibe
from the comments here? It seems we are all attributing this to a successful
lockdown rather than considering other scenarios. It feels very “rock that
wards off tiger”-y to me.

~~~
brlewis
A curve was trending exponential, and flattened with lockdown. What's the
alternate scenario for what caused the curve to flatten?

~~~
djsumdog
That SARS-CoV-2 was in our environment for months longer than thought, that
20% or more of Americans may already have antibodies, that tons of people
suffered from not being able to get essential heart, dental and other surgery
in preparation for some mythical surge that wouldn't have even happened
anyway. That there's no evidence social distancing did anything at all?

There are tons of other possibilities here. There simply isn't enough data,
and won't be until Feb 2021 where we can retroactively look back at data that
is cleaned, pruned and properly averaged.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What data do you think will exist by next year that we don't have now? Doctors
have recorded those who died with respiratory distress and other Covid19
symptoms, and that tested positive, as being victims -- that data is here now
and shows increased deaths haven't been just to co-morbidities not being
treated.

Test results are available to those in power.

The data is around, it's just not public because - I warrant - politicians
can't manipulate the story if the public has the full data.

~~~
djsumdog
We have never had time series data for any other illness, to this granularity.
The data is also terribly dirty.

The CDC doesn't track flu. It tracks pneumonia deaths, and then retroactively
uses surveillance data to estimate the number of deaths from different
infections.

U Washington also seems to be using entirely different data sets than Johns
Hopkins and the metrics for international data is not the same at all. I did a
post on some of the issues I found:

[https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-
data/](https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/)

------
mleonhard
I'm happy about this.

------
mydongle
Does this mean we won't get anymore nurse tiktok videos? That was money well
spent.

------
narogab
I told you so, I told you so, I told you so:

\[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=narogab](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=narogab)

In that discussion I somehow lost whatever karma I had on this BB. Despite
being polite and reasonable I was blasted into oblivion by some jerk(s). But
with my now (-2) karma I am not above being jerky myself by pointing out that
I was right, crooked-v was wrong, and any "field hospitals" the US Army made
would indeed be, _as I stated then_ , _field_ _hospitals_ and nothing like
what "crooked-v"
([https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crooked-v](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crooked-v)
) envisioned:

"Making these spaces fit the physical needs of these hospitals (massive power
requirements for equipment, hallways and elevators with certain amounts of
clearance for transporting patients, extremely well-controlled ventilation
systems, sanitizable surfaces everywhere, rooms laid out with central access
for doctors and nurses) would take so much time and effort that _it would be
more money- and time-efficient to build new buildings with the expertise of a
group practiced in building new, reasonably high-quality buildings as fast as
possible... like, say, the Army...These need to be modern hospitals, not 19th-
century sanitariums where patients just get dumped into a bed and left to die
or recover on their own. "_

\- crooked-v, being wrong, wrong, wrong

\- narogab, being a jerk and an asshole (but almost always, a _correct
asshole).[God, it feels good to let go of that knife].

------
jariel
100 temporary beds for $100M dollars cost to the government.

Oh that makes so much sense.

~~~
simonh
I knew there's be at least one.

A similar thing happened here in the UK, we converted an exhibition centre
(actually several in different cities) into Covid facilities. In the end we
only used a few hundred beds and soon shut them down. What made the difference
wasnt that we already had enough beds, but that other mitigating contingencies
such as converting other smaller facilities into emergency hospitals happened
fast enough, and moving patients out to less heavily hit areas softened the
crunch more than anticipated.

I don't think preparing these extra facilities was a mistake at all. There are
tons of unknowns and random variables in the progression of an epidemic, if we
had needed those beds and din't have them more people would have died,
possibly a lot of people. Complaining about waste is exactly like complaining
about there being any empty beds in any hospital at any time. We plan for peak
demand, including contingencies which may never come. It's like complaining
that the military have any soldiers at all that never shot at an enemy, or
bullets that never killed anyone. If we'd gone through the epidemic and there
hadn't been any spare capacity, we'd used exactly as many beds as we had, that
would have been bad preparation.

~~~
jariel
The line of thinking 'well there was a risk so any amount of money was worth
it' \- doesn't really hold.

People are rightly upset by 'mask gougers' why would they not in the face of
'hospital bed gougers' charging $500 000 / bed?

Resource utilization always matters, even in the face of life and death, costs
have to be justifiable in the context of risk.

I agree that given unknowns, we have to err on one side, but there are and
were ways to deal with such unknowns, for example, we have Spain, Italy, Korea
etc. as guides.

It's also possible to 'stage' the creation of such projects without having to
fully build them out, putting stages in places as necessary.

A 'million or 1/2 million dollars a bed' is utterly outrageous gouging,
there's no rationalization for it whatsoever.

~~~
simonh
Where did I, or anyone else say 'any amount of money' or anything
interpretable in that way?

There were credible scenarios, which could not have been discounted at the
time, in which that capacity would have been needed. Spain set up emergency
hospitals in convention centres, and a morgue in an ice rink. Those were
exactly the model we prepared to follow in the UK.

As for the costs structure of the US model, frankly I have no idea. The NHS
here works completely differently, suppliers do price gouge we're not immune
to it, but that sort of thing can't really happen at the bed-provision level
as that's an administrative rather than commercial issue.

------
xiphias2
These beds look just plain ugly and too small for relaxation that is needed
for healing when somebody's sick.

I'm extra scared about the virus, because I know that I would get to a place
like this, and I don't have the confidence that I would get the right
treatment. I have heared of other people as well who would rather stay at home
as much as they can, even if they can't breathe well.

But then when somebody needs the ICU, he really needs it fast, and at that
time it's too late to go to hospital.

------
s_y_n_t_a_x
Wow, those prices are staggering.

Taxpayer money wasted on a knee-jerk reaction by an emotional governor.

Glad he didn't get the 30k ventilators he wanted as well.

edit: Many people told him he didn't need that many before the fact.

I think it's perfectly fine to be critical of a governor if we're critical of
our president.

A leader should have some sort of vision into the future.

~~~
projektfu
We have spent 1/10000 of the money spent on this crisis for field hospitals.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
Don't worry, I'm not thrilled how the rest of it was spent either. Doesn't
mean I can't take issue with this.

That 1/10000th of the budget could have went to nursing homes or other
critical areas.

No matter how much a trillion is, several hundred million dollars is still a
lot of money...

