The news articles generally quote a staffer of some kind at various hospitals and then leave it at that.

It's difficult to know what to make of these stories. After all, we heard very much the same thing during March, April, and May of 2020. Local governments were building makeshift hospitals in convention centers—yet they went unused. Memphis's overflow hospital was closed down after an entire year of never housing a single patient. In late 2020, after months of media reports that New York hospitals were utterly overwhelmed, Andrew Cuomo announced New York hospitals "were never overwhelmed." Colorado built a twenty-two hundred–patient overflow hospital. It was never used. Last spring, a $17 million overflow facility in Houston was dismantled without ever being used.

Now we're being told that this time, they really mean it and hospitals are on the verge of overflowing.