Might as well go the rest of the way and do it like the “Shame” scene in Game of Thrones. They wouldn’t make it one block before the frostbite does its job.

I haven’t been keeping up with this kind of thing recently, do you have a link to an article or can you give me a quick rundown of the functional mechanism?

I really want to know what percent of the emergency department was blocked with boarders. This is the number one reason for prolonged wait times in US emergency rooms. The inpatient hospital floors frequently have physical space for more patients, but not enough nurses to take care of that many patients. The severe injustice of this to the ER staff is that, under US law, ERs are not allowed to turn people away without a medical examination and appropriate stabilizing treatment for serious conditions. This is why you might get shoved in a chair in a hallway with blinds around you so that the ER providers can see you.

This is also why ER nurses are hideously overworked. Floor nurses are usually limited to 4 to 6 patients, depending on complexity (ICU nurses get 1 to 3 depending on complexity)…but ER nurses can be stuck with up to 8 patients. I’ve worked in ERs where a single nurse had 4 patients that were supposed to be in inpatient hospital beds upstairs, 1 ICU patient, and 3 ER patients because they had enough day shift nurses to keep the ratios down, but weren’t able to discharge or transfer the patients and the night shift was understaffed.