The inpatient stroke unit at Stanford University Medical Center in California usually has 12 to 15 patients, said its director, Dr. Gregory Albers. On one recent day in April, there were none at all, something that had never happened. .
Back at the Cleveland Clinic, a man arrived with stroke symptoms on April 15. According to Dr. Thomas Waters, an emergency room physician, the man had waited two days to come in because he was afraid of the coronavirus. There was nothing doctors could do to prevent permanent brain damage.
I get that, but people wouldn't need to go to the emergency department if their continuing critical care hadn't been interrupted in the first place. Relying on emergency departments to take up a lot of slack can be an iffy proposition, since depending on the area and facility they may be very limited in room, resources and the level of trauma they can even address. They're really set up to diagnose, stabilize, patch up and either admit/transfer for further care which may have limitations of its own due to other consequences of the shutdown or discharge with instructions to contact their primary/specialist - whose office would be unavailable. The way the shutdown was administered created a backlog of misery that promises to be a continuing ordeal to address, complicated by clinics and hospitals all over that have laid off staff.