The Queens Hospital Center emergency department has a capacity of 60, but on its worst night of the pandemic, more than 180 patients lay on stretchers in observation bays and hallways. The alarms sounded incessantly as exhausted doctors rushed from crisis to crisis.
Less than four miles away, a temporary hospital opened the following morning, April 10. The facility, which was built at the USTA’s Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to alleviate the city’s overwhelmed hospitals, had hundreds of beds and dozens of trained medical professionals. to treat patients with viruses.
But in the entire month the site remained open, he treated only three patients from the Queens Hospital Center emergency department, according to records. Overall, the field hospital cost more than $ 52 million and served only 79 patients.
The pandemic has presented unique challenges for officials fighting a fast and largely unpredictable enemy. But the history of Billie Jean King’s facilities illustrates the mistakes made at all levels of government in the race to create more hospital capacity in New York. It’s a warning story for other states now facing waves of cases and for New Yorkers preparing for a possible second wave.
Doctors at the Queens Hospital Center, a public hospital in Jamaica, and other medical centers wanted to transfer patients to Billie Jean King. But they were blocked by bureaucracy, territorial battles and communication failures, according to internal documents and interviews with workers.
As the coronavirus spread in March, the federal government, state leaders, city officials, and hospital executives began creating their own temporary medical facilities, sometimes competing with each other. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s office oversaw most transfers to the centers, but city officials say the state did not coordinate closely with other players.
The largest contribution from the federal government, the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort, arrived in New York with great fanfare, but initially did not accept patients with coronavirus, prompting a hospital executive to call it “a joke.”
