$21 Million Brooklyn Field Hospital Closes After Treating Zero Patients
By Rick Moran
A field hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., built to deal with the coronavirus has been closed without treating a single patient. The $21 million facility was part of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s response to the growing number of coronavirus patients at New York City hospitals. That response included smaller facilities at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center and Stony Point (Long Island), and a huge, 1,100-bed medical center at the Javits Center.
All told, the state spent upwards of $350 million on facilities that were built but never used.
[City officials] expect the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pick up the costs for both of the temporary hospitals — which include an additional $2 million paid out to a second firm for construction management.
“As part of our hospital surge, we expanded capacity at a breakneck speed, ensuring our hospital infrastructure would be prepared to handle the very worst. We did so only with a single-minded focus: saving lives,” said Avery Cohen, a City Hall spokesperson.
Except they were building these facilities at “breakneck speed” at the same time the hospitalization rates for the virus were falling.
The tennis center, designed as a release valve for the beleaguered, city-run Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, accepted its first patients April 11.
The next day, hospital bed utilization across the city hit its crisis peak of 12,184 — including more than 3,100 patients in critical care, state data shows.
But since April 12, hospital occupancy has dropped steadily — staving off predictive scenarios that could have seen medical centers at least triple their number of beds from 20,000 to 60,000.