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U.S. hospitals are setting up circus-like triage tents, calling doctors out of retirement, guarding their supplies of face masks and making plans to cancel elective surgery as they brace for an expected onslaught of coronavirus patients.
Depending on how bad the crisis gets, the sick could find themselves waiting on stretchers in emergency room hallways for hospital beds to open up, or could be required to share rooms with others infected. Some doctors fear hospitals could become so overwhelmed that they could be forced to ration medical care.
"This is going to be a fairly tremendous strain on our health system," warned Dr. William Jaquis, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
The United States is still facing an active flu season, and many hospitals are already running at capacity caring for those patients. The new virus will only add to that burden, said Dr. Bruce Ribner an infectious-disease specialist at Emory University's medical school.
Government health authorities are taking emergency steps to waive certain laws and regulations to help hospitals deal with the crisis. Hospitals, too, are getting ready.
To keep suspected coronavirus patients from mingling with others in the ER, the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, Maine, set up a tent in the parking lot where people with respiratory symptoms are diverted for testing. Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia, South Carolina, did the same outside its emergency room.
In Seattle, hit by the nation's biggest cluster of coronavirus deaths, most of them at a suburban nursing home, UW Medicine set up drive-thru testing in a hospital parking garage and has screened hundreds of staff members, faculty and trainees, with nurses reaching through car windows and using swabs to collect specimens from people's nostrils . Drive-thru testing is expected to be offered to patients as soon as Monday.
At Spectrum Health Gerber Memorial Hospital in Fremont, Michigan, Robert Davidson, an emergency medicine doctor, said hip and knee replacement surgery and other operations that aren't emergencies might be postponed if an outbreak hits the area. Authorities in New York state and Illinois are talking about doing the same.
If an outbreak hits, "things that don't need to be done right now won't be done right now," said Dr. Raj Govindaiah, chief medical officer for Memorial Health System, which runs hospitals in Springfield, Lincoln, Decatur, Jacksonville and Taylorville, Illinois.
Govindaiah said the hospitals are also hiding the freebie surgical masks usually offered to visitors in the lobby, so that doctors and nurses can use them instead if supplies run tight. At Blue Ridge Regional Hospital in the small mountain community of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, respirator masks are locked and under video surveillance.
"We've really got to … expect that this is going to be bad," said Blue Ridge Regional's Dr. Gabriel Cade. "The situation in Italy is a huge eye-opener."
In New York state, which has a large outbreak, the Health Department is accelerating regulations to get nursing students certified to work more quickly and is asking retired doctors and nurses to offer their services, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.