Nelson, There is not "always a bed somewhere",

Nelson,

There is not "always a bed somewhere", unless that bed is back at home or the waiting room floor. Ohm posted the article about patients being turned away in Colorado. That article references inter-facility transfers.

These patients may suffer a heart attack, stroke, or serious injury in an outlying community. With covid, these patients can be denied transfer to a tertiary care hospital for life-saving care unavailable at smaller hospitals.

CT had two covid patients last year transferred respectively from Florida and Oklahoma for ECMO. They would have died without it. The same limitation of resources happens for the range of specialist care some patients require.

What is happening here in Connecticut is that inpatient beds are completely full, causing patients who would otherwise be admitted, to be boarded in the ED. Patients (as in the Colorado article) can't be shifted to other patients due to lack of capacity.

The EDs then will have dozens of boarded patients (technically admitted but literally not beds on the floors), causing a huge backlog into the ED. Hallways lined with stretchers, waiting rooms full, hours-long waits just to be seen.

At some, being turned away or waiting 8 hours to be seen is simply an academic exercise.

Many patients give up and go home.

It's bad here already and projected to get much worse. We are seeing more covid patients calling 911 than we every have. The saving grace is that all my colleagues are vaccinated, so we have far less fear of dying.