[EDITOR NOTE: The original article has been updated to include a response from the state.]

John Fox, CEO of Beaumont Health, the state’s largest hospital system, lashed out Sunday at a lack of communication among hospitals and state health officials as Michigan struggles with a surge of patients during the coronavirus crisis.

With COVID-19 cases and death counts rising steeply, particularly in metro Detroit, Fox cited frustration with data-sharing among hospital systems, which he said can mean delays as patients wait hours at times to be shifted to a hospital with more available resources, potentially putting patients in danger.

“If somebody has to wait 12 hours in one of our ERs, but they can be seen within two hours, five miles away, I think we have a moral obligation to tell the patient,” Fox said in a phone interview Sunday with Bridge Magazine and the Detroit Free Press.

Sunday evening, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services acknowledged that not all hospitals are “regularly reporting” patient and other data during the pandemic, as MDHHS had ordered. The state agency vowed that it would provide “improved additional information” within days.

Fox said that, just over a week ago, Beaumont’s Farmington Hills emergency room was so “slammed” that patients were waiting in the parking lot as doctors scrambled to find nearby emergency rooms to send them to — a routine practice when one hospital gets overloaded. Fox noted that waiting room capacity is even harder to manage as staffers seek to keep arriving patients distanced from one another.