U.S. Field Hospitals: A Study on Public Health Emergency Response to COVID-19

  1. Luorongxin Yuan
  2. Sherryn Sherryn
  3. Peter Hu
  4. Fenghao Chen

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Abstract

With the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rapidly growing in the U.S., many states are experiencing a shortage of hospital—especially ICU—beds. In addition to discharging non-critical patients, expanding local hospitals’ capacity as well as re-opening closed healthcare facilities, these states are actively building or converting public venues into field hospitals to fill the gap 1 . By studying these makeshift hospitals, we found that the states most severely impacted by the pandemic are fast at responding with the first wave of hospitals opening around the date of peak demand and the majority ready to use by the end of April. However, depending on the types of patients the field hospitals accept (COVID-19 vs. non-COVID-19) and how they are incorporated to local healthcare system, these field hospitals have utilization rate ranging from 100% to 0%. The field hospitals acting as alternative site to treat non-COVID-19 patients typically had low utilization rate and often faced the risk of COVID-19 outbreak in the facility. As overflow facilities, the field hospitals providing intensive care were highly relied on by local healthcare systems whereas the field hospitals dedicated to patients with mild symptoms often found it hard to fill the beds due to a combination of factors such as strict regulation on transferring patients from local hospitals, complication of health insurance discouraging health-seeking behavior, and effective public health measure to “flatten the curve” so that the additional beds were no longer needed.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.05.20169094: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.08.05.20169094v1 on medRxiv