WARMINGTON: No patients at Sunnybrook’s COVID field hospital?

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If Ontario’s hospital ICUs are overflowing, why is the temporary COVID field hospital at Sunnybrook empty and unused?

And why are patients being sent out of town to other parts of the province as Health Minister Christine Elliott said Wednesday?

“Intensive Care Units (ICUs) have more patients now than they ever did in previous waves,” Elliott told reporters. “With many hospitals at capacity, we are seeing patients being transferred to other hospitals for the care they need — sometimes hundreds of kilometres away.”

What’s the reason for this? There are 85 new, empty hospital beds at the field hospital.

When Toronto Sun Queen’s Park Bureau Chief Antonella Artuso asked this question, Elliott did not seem to have a complete answer.

“We have made considerable increases in the number of beds available knowing that COVID-19” would end up with “hospitalizations,” Elliott said.

She mentioned being “ready to stand up” a special parking lot unit at Sunnybrook but did not address why it’s not operational when increasing COVID-19 cases are so troublesome?

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When patients are reportedly being moved from hospitals in Toronto to Peterborough or Kingston, it raises questions about why those communities are being put at risk of COVID spread instead of making use of beds available right here.

Sunnybrook spokesperson Katherine Nazimek told the Toronto Sun “the mobile health unit is still in the process of being set up for patient care” and “should have more details in the coming week.”

What’s the rush? Isn’t the province supposed to be in a COVID crisis?

These tents have been visible at Sunnybrook for a month.

“We are ready for anything that might come our way,” Robert Burgell, Sunnybrook’s director of patient flow and emergency preparedness, told reporters March 9.

That was 30 days ago.

Accompanied by photographer Veronica Henri, I went there Wednesday, and it appears ready to go.

If it isn’t, that may even be a bigger concern than why it is not being used. Why take weeks to get an emergency unit going when you are locking everybody else down because things are supposed to be so out of control?

Even if the spin is these are not ICU beds, then the question is why build them in the first place? Or why not build more inside the hospital?

It’s not like COVID-19 modelling for April didn’t warn that things could spike.

No matter the excuse, if rising COVID cases are resulting in patients being transferred for care at hospitals hours away, then it would be wise to work every second to get this field unit up and running now. There did not seem to be any sense of urgency Wednesday.

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While Premier Doug Ford, who urged people to not be “negative” or “political,” may be able to shut down the economy, Ontario residents had better hope he can’t shut down scrutiny.

These sorts of questions need to be asked if the government is going to go to the extreme of imposing business and school closures and stay-at-home orders.

The statistics show that while there are increases in COVID-19 cases, the average number of daily deaths is not as high as it was earlier in this nightmare. And they don’t show a large number of fatalities being under 50.

It’s not negative to ask if the hospitals are overrun with COVID patients. Why not use these hospital beds since they are there anyway?

Nor is it unfair to ask if things in ICUs are as frightening they say, why not use the field hospital set up to treat the very health risk that has shut down the province.