It’s a thought that has crossed many minds in recent weeks: What if I get sick with coronavirus and need to go to the emergency room?

Where should I go? Which hospital will treat me quickly, and will it have a ventilator if I need one?

With the peak surge estimated to be less than two weeks away, residents of Milwaukee and across Wisconsin have no way of knowing.

Hospitals and the state Department of Health Services have refused to release information about how many patients with COVID-19 each hospital has, how many patients are on ventilators and what each hospital's remaining capacity is for intensive care beds or the potentially lifesaving machines.

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The lack of disclosure makes it impossible for the public to see the surge approaching in small neighborhoods or metropolitan areas. It also makes it difficult to spot disparities within communities.

“These are really important facts and figures that we need,” said Jaime Lucas, executive director of the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses & Health Professionals. “We have to know what’s available. We have to have some confidence in the system that is set up to care for us. I think we all deserve that.”

Specific hospital data from Milwaukee County could also help determine if critically ill patients will have to be transported to hospitals in Waukesha and Ozaukee counties — or farther — when the number of patients peaks.

And the data could help determine when patients may need to be treated at the temporary hospital being built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at the Wisconsin State Fair Park.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has been requesting the information from hospitals and the state for more than two weeks.

On Thursday, the Wisconsin Hospital Association in tandem with the Department of Health Services released an online dashboard that provides statewide and regional information — but no local data.

The dashboard includes figures on how many coronavirus patients are hospitalized, how many ventilators and intensive care beds are available overall and general figures on supplies of personal protective equipment.

“These capacity values and where we stand on hospital resources are obviously important for decision-makers to use in determining next steps,” Ben Weston, a physician and director of medical services for the Milwaukee County Office of Emergency Management, said at a briefing Thursday announcing the new dashboard. “But they’re also valuable for the public to know to understand where we are as a community.”

Yet the dashboard doesn’t contain community-level data.

Aggregate data from 133 hospitals across the state are carved into seven geographical regions. The southeast region is comprised of nine counties, lumping Walworth, Fond du Lac, Racine and Kenosha in with Milwaukee. The grouping masks how each of the 29 local hospitals in the region are faring during the pandemic.

This means, for example, that the information for Aurora Memorial Hospital of Burlington is indistinguishable from Ascension St. Joseph hospital in Milwaukee.

Already, disparities are cropping up with some hospitals being hit hard with COVID-19 patients while others in the same area are relatively quiet, doctors and nurses working for multiple hospitals told the Journal Sentinel.

"It’s unevenly distributed right now within a geographic area and nobody really understands why,” said one intensive care physician who did not want his name published.

“I don’t know if they’re playing financial games, trying to protect themselves financially,” he said of hospitals not disclosing information. “I would want to know if one place is especially busy and another had capacity for me.”

Ascension Columbia St. Mary’s hospital on the east side of Milwaukee and Aurora Mount Sinai Medical Center in the city’s downtown have been extremely busy in the last week, while Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa has not been, the health care workers said.

“We serve a predominantly African American community,” said one nurse from Columbia St. Mary’s. “Many of us are not too surprised that it’s affecting this population given the health conditions already present before the COVID epidemic hit.”

Diabetes, hypertension and respiratory disease are common underlying conditions in the African American community that the hospital serves, the nurse said, adding that a vast majority of the coronavirus patients seen in the intensive care unit were current or former smokers.

The nurse said more than 40 people with COVID-19 were on ventilators at the hospital this week and that the hospital had expanded its ICU capacity.

Ascension Wisconsin officials would not disclose the number of COVID-19 patients or answer specific questions about ventilators or bed capacity, citing “respect for patient privacy.”

“Ascension Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital Milwaukee currently has ICU bed capacity,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email. “The hospital has activated its medical staff surge plan in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. ... Emergency privileges have been given to physicians and advanced practice clinicians from other Ascension Wisconsin hospitals in the event they are needed.”

Advocate Aurora, the parent of Aurora Health Care, and Froedtert Health also would not provide the Journal Sentinel with COVID-19 census and ventilator data.

One hospital, SSM Health St. Mary's in Madison, promptly provided numbers of COVID-19 patients and other specific details when asked by the Journal Sentinel.

The hospital has converted more than 60 rooms into negative pressure rooms, which help contain the spread of the virus, and as of Thursday, was treating roughly a dozen COVID-19 patients, a spokeswoman said.

Melissa Baldauff, spokeswoman for Gov. Tony Evers, said the state and the Wisconsin Hospital Association are reluctant to release statistics about individual hospitals out of fear that the public will flock to not-so-busy hospitals and overwhelm them.

“We want the systems working together regionally and to not have one system overwhelmed,” Baldauff said.

The approach taken by the state, paradoxically, means that patients will continue to go to hospitals that are busy and possibly overwhelmed.

Baldauff said the state has been working hard to encourage hospitals to provide the regional data. The dashboard released Thursday contained information from about 98% of hospitals in the state, she said.

She and others called the dashboard a positive step.

“This dashboard can help the public understand what hospitals and health systems have been doing to ramp up capacity for their communities, while also providing important data,” said Eric Borgerding, president and CEO of the Wisconsin Hospital Association.

The dashboard showed that as of Thursday, 446 patients are hospitalized in Wisconsin with COVID-19, with 196 in intensive care units. Of those in ICU, 149 are in the nine-county southeast region.

For years, Wisconsin hospitals have used an online alert system to advise each other of their capacity and their status. The system, currently known as EMResource, has more than 100 lines of information for hospitals to share, including numbers on ICU beds and patients on ventilators.

The system is maintained by the state Department of Health Services, but it is unclear how it is being used during the COVID pandemic. The department has not answered questions about the role of the alert system.

Officials have not made the data from the alert system public.

The lack of transparency by state and hospital officials is not acceptable, said David Riemer, senior fellow at the Milwaukee-based Community Advocates Public Policy Institute, a nonprofit, anti-poverty organization.

“Residents of Milwaukee and Wisconsin should have access to this information in a simple and timely way unless there is a clear and compelling reason why the public can’t be informed,” Riemer said. “People’s lives hang in the balance.”

Martha “Meg” Gaines, the retired director of the Center for Patient Partnerships and professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, also said that the information should be available.

“This is not proprietary information. This is public health data,” Gaines said. “We are in the midst of the crisis. It is very basic information about public health.”

John Diedrich of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.