Betsy McCaughey on Coronavirus: Most Hospitals ‘Are Not Prepared for the Surge of Patients’

Hospitals will soon face a crisis via a “surge of patients” infected with the coronavirus, warned Betsy McCaughey, New York Post columnist and former lieutenant governor of New York, in an interview on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Lee Smith.

“I’m worried about what’s going to happen in our hospitals. They will be facing a crisis very soon, but at the moment let’s keep some perspective on the numbers here,” McCaughey said. “Nationwide we have 18 cases of 18 deaths from coronavirus. We’ve had 18,000 deaths from flu this year, as a mild season; 18,000 flu deaths [and] 18 deaths from coronavirus.”

Hospitals are not prepared to handle the volume of coronavirus patients that will be coming as the viral outbreak expands, cautioned McCaughey. 

Asked by Mansour if hospitals are prepared for growing numbers of coronavirus infection, McCaughey replied, “Absolutely not.”

“The hospitals are the weak links,” McCaughey estimated. “Our hospitals operate almost up to capacity most of the time, so they are not prepared for the surge of patients. The hospitals I talked to are already making plans to eliminate single rooms, for people to double up, [and] to set up clinics in tents in the parking lot to discharge patients earlier than they otherwise would, all to make room for patients with the coronavirus.”

McCaughey added, “They know they’re going to be overwhelmed. They’re going to be operating in an environment of extreme scarcity, and not only because of space demands, but because their healthcare workers are going to get sick, and they’re going to have too few people working there.”

Hospitals will face a “crisis,” McCaughey stated. “It is going to be really serious.”

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Hospitals are rescheduling medical procedures and shifting resources in anticipation of increasing intake of coronavirus, McCaughey noted. “They’re looking for ways to extend their space and change their routines, and I know surgeons here in New York already telling patients they’re going to be postponing elective surgeries because there won’t be any room for them.”

McCaughey advised at-risk persons — particularly the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions — to avoid unnecessary exposure to high-traffic places.

“People who are over 70 should start to really exercise caution,” McCaughey recommended. “Don’t get on an airplane for a long trip. I wouldn’t get on, at all. Avoid big crowds, arenas, cocktail parties, and meetings.”

“The riskiest place to be is a nursing home,” added McCaughey. “The second riskiest place to be is in a hospital. Everybody talks about arenas and cruise ships, but where are the deaths occurring? In hospitals or nursing homes, because infection control is so terrible, so lacking, so shoddy that once one person gets it and is in a healthcare institution, it just spreads so fast.”

McCaughey stated, “I can’t think of a more dangerous place but then an emergency room,” highlighting a recent report of a coronavirus-infected Uber driver who possibly exposed others to infection in an emergency room in New York City, leading to the furloughing of 40 healthcare workers.

McCaughey remarked, “I think the public health authorities are doing a very good job. They’re on the cusp between mitigation and containment. They’re still using all the traditional tools of the epidemiologists, tracing the contacts of people who have already been diagnosed, quarantining those and need to be quarantined, and at the same time, they’re they’re moving over to the mitigation phase which is cancelling events, creating a lot of social distancing, and closing schools. It will work.”

McCaughey praised President Donald Trump’s strategy to address the coronavirus outbreak, describing the president’s travel ban as the “the most important decision he made in his presidency.”

“The president did something really smart on February 2 when he closed off international travel,” McCaughey said. “Foreigners could not come in and Americans returning from that part of the world had to be quarantined for 14 days. That was absolutely brilliant. He did it over the protests of all the globalists and politically-correct types and it bought us enough time to really ramp up before it started to spread widely.”

“I think [Donald trump] is doing a superb job in the way he’s rolled this out,” added McCaughey. “The only thing he’s been hobbled by is the CDC, and that’s not really his doing, because that agency has been ineffectual for years. This is the same agency that led the opioid crisis allowed the obesity crisis occur.”

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is overly focused abroad, McCaughey estimated. They’re fighting things all around the world, but here at home, they’re not paying enough attention.”

The Committee to Reduce Infection Rates, founded by McCaughey, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization advocating for improved protocols within hospitals and other healthcare centers to reduce the spread of infections.

New anti-viral technologies should be used in hospitals and other healthcare infrastructure, recommended McCaughey.

There are now technologies that deactivate viruses in the air and continuously disinfect surfaces,” explained McCaughey. ‘They’re used in hatcheries, in food processing plants, in vast food outlets, [and] everywhere that you need clean air and surfaces. They’re used even in agribusiness inside big swine barns.”

McCaughey added, “There’s something about our our CDC our our health authorities, they’re very anti-new technology. It’s such a shame, because these technologies could be rolled into hospitals and nursing homes [to] defeat this very quickly. If hospitals and nursing homes were as clean as food processing plants, we wouldn’t have all these infections. The factory were they make the hot dog is much cleaner than the operating room where they’re operating on your grandma.”

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.

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