Following the advice of your healthcare provider is generally good idea during a pandemic. But that doesn’t mean your local hospital’s social media account won’t lead you astray.
Hundreds of Marylanders stood on the sidewalk along Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda — not always socially distanced — for nothing, thanks to bad information from local Suburban Hospital.
The backstory is one of the nice, uniting, cheery stories out of this current lockdown. Air Force and Navy bases across the country are deploying their coolest planes to fly over local hospitals as a salute to doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers.
B-52s from Barksdale Air Force Base flew over the hospitals in and around Shreveport, Louisiana, on Friday, April 24. The Navy’s Blue Angels and the Air Force’s Thunderbirds did a joint flyover of New York City hospitals on Tuesday, April 28. Throughout the country, hospital workers and neighbors cheered the flights.
But in Bethesda, the story was sadder.
Suburban Hospital, an arm of Johns Hopkins Hospitals located right outside of Washington, D.C., advertised a flyover on social media. For instance, the hospital’s Instagram account stated: “Tomorrow, April 25, the Blue Angels, Thunderbirds and KC-135R aircraft will perform a flyover of hospitals in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. They are expected to fly over Suburban Hospital around 12:15 p.m.”
The locals listened. And they showed up.
“Hundreds of people lined the sidewalks around Suburban Hospital in Bethesda Saturday morning to watch a flyover of military aircraft,” Bethesda Beat reported, “despite social distancing restrictions and Gov. Larry Hogan’s stay-at-home order.”
The parking garage roof had viewers. Surface parking lots had gatherings. And the narrow sidewalk, alongside a busy three-lane road with no grassy strip, was packed. While most tried to maintain a 6-foot buffer, it was not always possible.
One local woman, Eve, brought her son Adrian and noted the oddity of showing up at a hospital in a gathering doctors would tell you to avoid. “I thought it was ironic that we are standing in a crowd in front of a hospital,” she told Bethesda Beat. “Still, we want to live life, too.”
In Suburban’s defense, the hospital had posted, “Please remember to maintain proper physical and social distancing from wherever you view the flyover.”
But 12:15 p.m. came and went with no jets. They never showed up. Was Suburban just wrong? Did the pilots flake out?
The Air Combat Command would later blame the “inadvertent release of planning and coordinating information. The information shared did not come from either of the demonstration teams’ official accounts.”
It wasn’t the most confidence-inducing for a country looking for competent leadership — or simply some cool planes flying overhead.
