The New York hospital cost $52 million but treated only 79 coronary patients

U.S. authorities have been highly challenged in recent months to create temporary hospitals in the fight against coronarys in New York.

Queens' Hospital Centre emergency department has a capacity of 60 beds, but the worst day of COVIDD-19, more than 180 patients also lie in hospital corridors.

The ambulance alarms went off constantly as exhausted doctors ran from one patient to the next.

But less than six miles [6 km] away, a temporary hospital opened the next morning, April 10th.

The facility was built at the national tennis centre, “Billie Jean King”, to support the city's busy hospital capacities, where there were hundreds of beds and a number of medical professionals to treat virus patients, writes The New York Times.

But throughout April, he treated only three patients, showing the data of the Queens Hospital Centre.

What makes the fact that the improvised hospital cost more than $52 million and so far treated only 79 patients.

Pandemia has presented unique challenges for officials who fought a swift and largely unpredictable enemy.

However, the story of the “Billie Jean King” illustrates the errors made at every level of the American government in the race to create more hospital capacity in New York, writes the American medium, broadcast Telegraphy.

In fact, New York paid $732 per hour for several doctors at “Bille Jean King”, but the city had them spend hours on official paperwork and spend more time on state bureaucracy.

They were supposed to treat patients with coronavirus, but they refused people with fever, a distinctive symptom of the virus.

Officials said the improvised hospital would serve patients with serious illness, but hospital workers claimed that only two ventilators were available.

I basically paid $2000 a week to sit on my phone and look at Facebook”, said Katie Capano, a nurse doctor from Baltimore, who worked in “Billie Jean King”. We all felt very ashamed”, she added.

In past disasters, such as during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the New York State established a unified health system to transfer patients to hospitals.

This did not happen during the coronavirus pandemic, leaving hospitals in low-income areas, while some wealthy private medical centers had cheap beds, NYT writes.

The largest facilities opened in Manhattan, late March, Comfort and Javis Center. They treated about 1,400 patients, although only about 300 of them came from public hospitals, the data shows.

Facing an anticipated shortage of 50,000 beds, federal officials spent more than $320m to build facilities at two state colleges and Westchester County Center while the city spent about $20m in Brooklyn, the data shows.

After all, reality never approached terrible predictions, and none of those facilities were exploited.

Otherwise, Billie Jean King closed on 13 May, and doctors and nurses returned to their hospital centers.