Originally Posted by
Dachsie
Woodman, I do not think it works like you say.
I worked a summer job in a large state teaching hospital from 3 pm to 11 pm as the emergency room admitting clerk.
The population we are talking about is Black and Latino minority population that is presumed to be poor and without insurance, but not necessarily young.
People of all skin colors and ethnicity who do not have health insurance do not first go to a free clinic for their health problems. They first go to the emergency room and use that as their clinic. They bring the whole family and sit out in the waiting room for hours on end waiting their turn to be seen and they know that real trauma cases and serious symptom patients always are seen first by the doctor. That is why the patients are triaged by a nurse the minute they come in. Some EMT / ambulance attendees know to bring heart attack and stroke patients or respiratory shutdown straight to the "crash room" or crash cart for cardio-vascular.
Free or low-cost doctor offices/clinics are not open after hours or weekends and do not want to treat acute patients immediately in the clinic. That is not their role and their purpose. Those patients and EMTs know to go straight to the emergency room.
I suspect this hospital in Queens has a mindset to harvest and use patients who are having respiratory stress and are concerned they might have the "pandemic virus", so they are the perfect poor and ignorant patients to use for their city's plans to juice money out of the system for the hospital, pump up the virus scare and panic mindset, and score political points with their mayor and governor.
These doctors and this hospital are not practicing professional traditional emergency room medicine.