Health officials are certainly sounding the alarm. But what happened to the four sites that were transformed into makeshift COVID-19 hospitals earlier this year at taxpayers’ expense?
CHICAGO (CBS) — Statewide the number of new COVID-19 cases dropped dramatically — well below 10,000 — for the first time in nearly two weeks. But there were 140 deaths reported Wednesday in just the last 24-hour period. Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, painted a bleak picture of the situation at the state’s hospitals. “The number of COVIDs in the hospitals, however you want to count it, has gone extremely up and to the point where people who are coming in with a compound fracture might be sitting in the emergency room for days waiting to either be transferred to a place where there is a bed, another place, or waiting for someone in the hospital to be released before they can get in,” she said. Health officials are certainly sounding the alarm. But what happened to the four sites that were transformed into makeshift COVID-19 hospitals earlier this year at taxpayers’ expense? It was a quick, almost Herculean effort last spring.
