The Non-COVID Hospital Crisis

The hospital fallout from the lockdowns

As in Michigan and Minnesota, Massachusetts hospitals are reporting in the media a lack of beds and resources for patients.

However, Massachusetts is not blaming COVID-19. Rather the hospitals are under duress from the ripple effect of disrupted healthcare brought on by the lockdown responses to the pandemic.

“Patients did defer care for a variety of reasons, either they couldn’t get in to see healthcare providers or they were afraid to,” said Katie Murphy an ICU nurse with the Massachusetts Nurses Association. She says patients are coming in sicker as a result.

The article does contain some questionable data: it puts the number of hospital beds in Massachusetts at 10,386, while the Johns Hopkins/HHS data puts the total far higher, at 17,199. However, a cursory view of the per hospital data confirms that COVID-19 cases are far and away the the minority of patients in hospital in Massachusetts.

The “pandemic of the uninfected” exists in Massachusetts just as it does in Michigan and Minnesota.