A temporary hospital that was created in New York City amid the coronavirus outbreak had a hefty price tag but saw less than 80 patients.
U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens was turned into a hospital opening its doors on April 20 and cost at least $52 million, according to The New York Times. As it closed on May 13, the temporary hospital served a total of 79 patients.
As New York quickly became the epicenter in the U.S. at the start of the outbreak, there was a rush to put up the temporary medical facility. But the low number of patients treated at this facility shows the “missteps” of the local, state and federal government, as the Times puts it.
“I basically got paid $2,000 a day to sit on my phone and look at Facebook,” a nurse practitioner from Baltimore who worked at the center, Katie Capano, told The Times. “We all felt guilty. I felt really ashamed, to be honest.”
With hardly any patients to take care of, some doctors at the temporary hospital were paid $732 an hour but spent time doing paperwork.
Some of the things that created complications, as the Times notes, are “bureaucracy, turf battles and communication failures,” as well as patients with fevers not being accepted at the temporary hospital. Ambulances could also not take 911 calls to the tennis facility, leaving it up to transfers which were few. According to the article, private hospitals also could not transfer patients to Billie Jean because the tennis facility-turned-hospital was only for public hospital transfers. Other reasons attributing to low turnout included the fear that those at Billie Jean could not help patients with severe symptoms and public hospitals reportedly fearing losing revenue, as well as other factors.
Dr. Timothy Tan, the director of clinical operations at the Queens Hospital Center emergency department, also told the Times, “The conditions in the emergency room during this crisis were unacceptable and dangerous.”
“Knowing what our patients had to endure in an overcrowded emergency department, it’s frustrating how few patients were treated at facilities such as Billie Jean King,” Tan added.
The senior vice president at the city’s public hospital system, Matt Siegler, told the Times, “The thing that saved the most lives was to treat them in expanded capacity in the hospitals, and bring staff into the hospitals, and that’s what we were focused on.”
In April, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said at the tennis center, “This is a war effort. This facility will be crucial.”
Times’ Brian Rosenthal wrote in the piece, “Billie Jean King, the only emergency hospital built by the city, should have been a success story: It opened at the height of the pandemic, with a full staff eager to treat virus patients.”
The state of New York has seen a decrease in coronavirus cases, going from 12,274 reported cases on April 4 to 519 cases reported on July 20.
