Hospitals Can’t Accept This as ‘Normal’

At the height of the recent Omicron surge, Advocate Trinity Hospital, in Chicago, was inundated with patients who spent more than 40 hours in the waiting room, holding tight for a bed in the emergency room, which was itself heaving with people who were waiting for a spot in the intensive-care unit, which was also full. Someone admitted at night might have seen two sunrises before they saw a bed. The hospital received more COVID-19 patients than at any previous point during the pandemic. These patients waited, as did people with other conditions. “We had patients waiting with bacterial infections, surgical problems, you name it … people who were sick to a degree that we’d never keep them waiting in normal conditions,” Michael Anderson, the emergency department’s medical director, told me. That the hospital could be so besieged two years into the pandemic “is something I never thought in my wildest dreams would occur,” Matt Fox, a respiratory therapist, told me.

To see as many patients as quickly as possible, the hospital’s exhausted staff brought intensive care into the emergency room, using portable oxygen tanks sourced from a local company. They brought emergency services into the waiting room, installing catheters and ordering medical tests for people who couldn’t yet be given a bed. They resuscitated a patient who had