Washington Monthly reports:

In early March, public health officials issued warnings about what the spreading coronavirus could mean for the Pittsburgh region. Debra Bogen, director of the health department for surrounding Allegheny County, forecast that between 40 to 60 percent of the adults in western Pennsylvania could come down with COVID-19 unless strong mitigation measures were taken. The Harvard Global Health Institute predicted that Pittsburgh-area hospitals could need between 480 to 720 percent more beds than were currently available. Meanwhile, federal officials, ranging from the surgeon general of the United States to scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that hospitals would spread the contagion further if they continued performing non-urgent care.

Heeding this expert advice, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf issued an executive order on March 19 requiring all the state’s hospitals and doctors to stop performing elective procedures. Such surgeries are highly lucrative. But hospitals understood the gravity of the situation, or at least recognized Wolf’s authority. Systems throughout the state quickly complied.

Except one.

In their headquarters atop the 64-story former U.S. Steel Tower in downtown Pittsburgh, executives of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), a $21 billion hospital chain and health insurer, took a different course. Ignoring not only the governor’s order but also an open protest letter signed by 291 of their own doctors, UPMC decided on March 20 that the 40 hospitals they control would continue conducting elective surgeries.

At a press conference, UPMC tried to justify its decision by asserting that there were only five known COVID-19 cases in the Pittsburgh area at the time, and that, despite insufficient numbers of tests, they were monitoring the situation closely. They also argued that they weren’t technically violating the governor’s order because the elective procedures weren’t really elective, at least as they used the term. “ ‘Elective’ commonly means scheduled cases, but scheduled does not mean unnecessary,” Donald Yealy, UPMC’s chair of emergency medicine, said. Bogen disputed those semantics. “We ask that UPMC, like all the other health care providers in our community, begin to address this request from the governor and from us,” she said. The Pittsburgh Post–Gazette, the city’s leading newspaper, lambasted UPMC for its decision. The hospital system, they wrote, was “endangering lives by continuing to perform elective surgeries despite pleas by state and local health officials to postpone them.” [Continue reading…]