Is clinic following safe practices, is a video visit possible, should clinic treat my emergency?

So how do we balance the risk of contracting COVID-19 at a health facility against the risk of not seeking care?

“Hospitals and clinics are reducing the on-site transmission risk by limiting or restricting visitors, postponing elective procedures, screening staff for illness before they start their shifts and accelerating the use of telehealth,” Amy Williams, a physician and executive dean for practice at Mayo Clinic, said in an email.

The CDC issued COVID-19 care guidelines, which specify ideal infection control procedures, but Williams acknowledges “resource constraints are making it nearly impossible to meet guidelines.” It doesn’t mean hospitals aren’t providing good care, she says. It means, “they are providing the best care they can in extremely difficult circumstances.”

That puts some of the burden back on us, the patients, to stay safe and be proactive. Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, suggests following the new normal precautions.

“Make sure you’re not all sitting in a waiting room together,” he says. “If the waiting room looks crowded, I might yell, ‘Are we going to do social distancing, or what’s happening here? Can’t we spread the seats in the hall?’ ”

I’m not sure I would shout, but I would definitely speak to the receptionist or office manager — pronto. We all need to take responsibility for safeguarding one another from exposure.

Caplan also recommends a mask, even if it is not required, just to be safer. Before meeting your health-care provider, Caplan recommends washing your hands or using hand sanitizer (bring it with you, just in case). When you get home, wash your hands, your clothes and that mask (or throw it away), and take a shower, he cautions.

Deciding whether to go to an ER or doctor can be tough decisions, especially since we can’t turn to Yelp or Healthgrades to see which hospitals, clinics and doctors are tightly following CDC guidelines for COVID-19. If I needed surgery right now, I’d have to balance the number of coronavirus patients in a particular hospital with the expertise of the surgeon there. And what if I did get sick with covid-19? It’s a tough question.

“Hospitals that have the resources and highly trained and experienced clinical care teams will be able to care for these very sick patients more successfully than hospitals that do not,” Williams says. So a small local clinic for a broken arm and a large urban hospital for the virus? It’s a conundrum and often not that black and white.

Regardless, Williams said, their campuses expect “to operate in a COVID environment for the next year or longer . . . where infections will be within our hospitals and the communities we serve.”

For visits that don’t require face-to-face contact, there’s a great alternative: telemedicine, a.k.a. video visits. The Mayo Clinic, for instance, has gone from 40 scheduled video appointments a day in early March to more than 2,000 daily by late April, Williams says.

NYU’s Caplan says, “If you can do it by telemedicine, then do it by telemedicine.” It’s not only safer, but “it’s not taking anybody’s resources away,” he says.

It’s hard to weigh how risky getting medical care right now is, but if you have an emergency like a broken a bone or a possible heart attack or stroke, you should go to the ER.