Nurse Says COVID-19 Good for the ER

A nurse took to Facebook to explain how COVID-19 is good for the ER (emergency room).

Tricia Peterson, a nurse in Mississippi, posted the status in hopes that it would be a lesson to people as she explained how the coronavirus has helped the ER situation.

As she explained in her post, people are not coming into the emergency room for non-emergency situations out of fear of being exposed to the coronavirus. Before COVID-19, people were putting ERs into gridlock with everything from hangnails to common cold symptoms. Now that the pandemic has reached our shores, only the ones that are truly in need of emergency care are entering the emergency rooms, as it should be.

I spoke with a local nurse, a local physician's assistant, and an emergency room attending physician who all work at local hospitals, and all 3 said that they noticed the same situation: some emergency rooms are seeing less non-emergency visits.

The moral of the story: the emergency room is for emergencies. The walk-in clinic or your primary care physician is for everything else. If you educate yourself to know the difference, emergency rooms will be much better able to handle real emergencies.