Gov. Charlie Baker said Saturday that the state's effort to set up field hospitals to handle a flood of coronavirus cases has enabled the state medical system to keep treating non-COVID patients at a normal capacity.
Baker toured a new 1000-bed medical facility called Boston Hope that has been set up inside the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center; there are currently about 150 patients in the center, Baker said.
As the surge of COVID cases continues in the state, with more than 2,000 new cases being identified daily, Baker said the construction of new hospital beds created a system for caring for those patients, but also protecting hospital access for other patients.
The strategy was intended "to make sure that our health care system would not be overwhelmed by COVID-19 and would have the ability — which it continues to have today here in the Commonwealth of Mass to take care of all of the other things that everybody expects a world class heath care system like the one we have here in Massachusetts to be able to do."
The strategy "has worked exactly as many of us had hoped it would" Baker said, so go ahead and call your doctor.
"If you are dealing with something yourself and you don't feel well, you should absolutely call your clinician and make sure that you are not worried about the system's ability to meet your needs. The system can do that. That's a big part of what we all put so much work into building this excess capacity."
