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.
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.
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.
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...
EDIT: Oh, or were you referring to sources around the impacts of systemic inflammation? I can certainly provide those if you're interested.
I used to live in new england. No part of NY is further than a few hours drive from any other part of the state, especially during lockdown traffic. The Stony Brook facility was on Long Island, only a 60-mile drive from downtown NYC. An ambulance/bus in a hurry could easily make the drive in under an hour.
What? Buffalo to NY is 6 hours.
Many of these hospitals treated literally zero patients. Hospitals weren't overwealmed by people in care homes. They were overwealmed by people in the hospital. I don't see why some subset of those patients couldn't have been shipped to these field hospitals. NY was asking for volunteers to come from all over the country to relieve their struggling hospital system. But there were federal hospitals standing idle a short drive away? Why weren't they loading the not-yet-crititcal patients into busses and taking them to Stony Brook (capacity 1038, patients treated 0)?
Meaningless admission/overadmission rates which are clearly vastly wrong/misinterpreted and in turn based on a huge percentage of over 75s being hospitalised and a majority of them in turn needing ventilation.
Except in reality patients of that age are rarely ventilated because they wouldn't survive such an invasive treatment and if they are the recovery is 6-8 months and long and painful and has poor recovery outcomes. That predicate was wrong in the paper.
Secondly the field hospitals built could only receive patients who had no other underlying or exacerbating conditions because the FHs lack the staff and equipment to care for them. Given that practically every person who died from a respiratory covid infection had such issues it rendered them fairly pointless.
The paper also didn't do much to deal with the fact this activity will cause a surge in deaths of non covid related fatalities. Whole other issue
1) New York was the area hardest it, it got hit initially, it has incredibly high concentration of people, and since it got hit early we had the least amount of information about the virus. Because of the small geographic area, high population density, and quick spike of infections you get a subset of hospitals strained for resources in that area, but not the whole nation. Similar to pulling a hose and it gets caught on something which makes it harder to pull, it isn't there isn't enough slack in the hose, it is that there isn't enough slack in the hose at one spot.
2) There has been a heavy politicization of the whole 'Rona situation and so different factions are either trying to downplay it, or exacerbate it to try and score political points.
3) Fear gets more clicks than, sunny day stories.
4) Pushing an over the top message of worry may convince people to be more cautious who otherwise wouldn't be. Like if you want a 3% raise, you don't go in and ask your boss for a 3% raise, ask him for 5% or 7% that way he can negotiate you down to a 3% and still feel like he won, and kept you for less than you wanted and you still get what you wanted.
5)There is an alternative possiblity. There is a grand conspiracy by either, the deep state, the Illuminati, the elite, the superwealthy, secret neo-Nazis, the Communists, the bicoastal liberal elite, the CIA, to kill people by the millions using COVID-19 and it turns out the conspiracy is really bad at it.
EDIT:
I also want to make clear I don't want to downplay the situation of various healthcare workers who have been heroically making sacrifice. I believe many of them are honestly expressing their opinion and are worried about PPE or other issues, and may have experienced it; however there are probably hundreds of thousands of people involved in the New York healthcare system, if only 1% of 100,000 people feel overwhelmed at some point and post a video, or send a tweet about it that is 1,000 stories, but may not represent a consensus view.
Maybe that video is fake, but I am wondering how many of these deaths might be due to malpractice.