The opening is: "As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country. The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records. But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven't treated a single patient."
The motivating event is that we're starting to decommission these facilities, but the author instead chooses to emphasize how much they cost and how few patients were treated.
It's also a bit cynical to say "nearly four months into the pandemic", as if there have been four months where the hospitals could have been seeing patients in the US but didn't.
Also, in the big picture this cost is trivial. 660m is less than $2 per person. Compare that to the 3T bailout or so (numbers change so quickly I can't keep up), which is around $10,000 per person.
Its not cynical, if the entire point is to flatten the curve below maximum capacity. Flattening significantly below capacity (or increasing capacity and not using it) only extends the required time in lockdown (based on some admittedly questionably assumptions, but assumptions currently being relied on).
And no matter how much you trivialize costs, it's always better to spend on resources that will be used that ones that won't. Like funding the ERs that are currently dealing with the double whammy of covid patients and seeing only 40-50% of normal patient numbers (and therefore 40-50% of normal income).
Plus we really don't want to flatten the curve to the point where people start losing aquired immunity before we've reached levels for herd immunity. Then it's no longer a curve, but a never-ending line. At least until a successful vaccine is developed.
Funny I wrote a longer response that I trimmed down to just my broken windows fallacy jab where I talked about how building, stocking, and manning field hospitals that remain underutilized is wasting resources, akin to hoarding spare windows.
The motivating event is that we're starting to decommission these facilities, but the author instead chooses to emphasize how much they cost and how few patients were treated.