This State Has the Longest ER Waiting Time in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 28, 12:30PM EST

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This State Has the Longest ER Waiting Time in America — © MJFelt / iStock via Getty Images

The COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the way America’s hospitals work and the burden put on hospital staff, doctors and nurses. In hard-hit areas, intensive care bed availability disappeared. Occupancy of other hospital beds was also turned over to people who contracted the virus. Emergency rooms overflowed and people were in makeshift beds, in some cases for days. Hospitals began to lose key personnel because these people felt entirely overwhelmed or became infected.

Emergency rooms have been the “front doors” to hospitals for years, particularly facilities that treated people without insurance or other means to cover medical expenses. The spread of COVID-19 undermined the ability to perform this function.

Between the normal flow of emergency room cases and COVID-19 patients, some facilities have basically closed to anything other than the most severe cases.

According to research by IT service automation company SysAiD, emergency room median waiting periods in all 50 states topped 100 hours over the period of the study that which ran from January 7, 2020, to March 31, 2021. That means it caught most of the serious inflows during the worst of the pandemic. The conclusions were based on Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data.
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The most notable conclusion of the study was that sparsely populated states had the shortest emergency room waiting times and crowded states had the longest. The state with the shortest waiting time was North Dakota at 104 minutes, followed by South Dakota at 113 and Nebraska at 114. The state with the longest waiting time was Maryland, the only state with an average wait time of more than 200 minutes.

These are the 20 states with the longest ER waiting times:

Maryland (228 minutes)
Delaware (195 minutes)
Massachusetts (189 minutes)
Rhode Island (185 minutes)
New York (184 minutes)
Arizona (176 minutes)
New Jersey (173 minutes)
Connecticut (166 minutes)
California (164 minutes)
Illinois (157 minutes)
North Carolina (157 minutes)
Oregon (157 minutes)
Pennsylvania (157 minutes)
Florida (155 minutes)
New Hampshire (154 minutes)
Virginia (154 minutes)
Michigan (153 minutes)
Kentucky (151 minutes)
South Carolina (151 minutes)
New Mexico (150 minutes)

Click here to see which 46 general hospitals received the top hospital award in 2021.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.