>> "It was very disappointing," Gonzalez said. "Everybody was here, ready to work, ready to get patients in."

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)?

The field hospital concept to increase capacity to reduce deaths was based on, in the UK, the Imperial paper which was based on, frankly a non realistic interpretation of the input data from China and Italy.

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