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Comment by leesalminen | Hacker News Reader

Did you go to an emergency room in 2019, by chance? Waiting many hours to be admitted has been the norm in American healthcare for a very long time.

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According to the staff, the temporary holding area I was in (an office cube farm converted to holding patients in recliners) was new, as was the practice of lining every available hallway with people in beds. I went to this hospital specifically because it was close to home (riding in a car with an appendicitis is agony), and because it advertised low wait times. It turns out the low wait time was to be triaged, not to be treated.

Sure but now the times are astronomical and they may take one look at you and say you're too far gone and let you die because ICU simply doesn't have any beds. So some dummy who wouldn't get the vaccine just killed (by proxy) your relative most likely.

Thank you for this needed comment. ER wait times were a problem before Covid. I've experienced waiting in an ER with a loved one who was convulsing, it was extremely scary and sobering to see how long we waited (about an hour or so). This was before covid.

Emergency Rooms were scary and full before Covid!

I was hospitalized with the FLU Jan 20th 2016, that day this particular Hospital (a major university hospital in a large US city) reached a record for number of patients admitted. That record still stands to this day.

That's really interesting! Did the hospital or staff seem to have trouble keeping up with patients?

People lining the hallways waiting is not the norm in American healthcare

FYI, here is an article from The Atlantic describing just that from 2015.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency...

It may not be the norm, but how unusual was it?

Eesh. I guess I am lucky where I live - even when the hospitals are at 95% capacity I got stitches real quick a month ago

They're generally talking about ICUs and the like. You didn't need ICU for stitches most likely.

Please point a time out where it was spread across the country in recent memory at our current scale. You can't. No one is saying some regional event won't do it (hurricane for example). However currently it's a much bigger issue particularly in states that are still saying covid is basically the flu while their hospitals are over full and they're begging traveling doctors and nurses to come and help out.

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