The scenes out of New York City, which is finally moving past its emergency phase, were indelible. The Jacob Javits center turned into a hospital. A naval ship, the USNS Comfort, docking in the harbor as a floating medical center. Makeshift tents in Central Park.

While New Yorkers cheered their medical personnel during the shift change every night, my thoughts turned to the question of why New York City needed so much assistance just to house patients. Sure, they had one of the worst, if not the worst spike in the world. But Olivia Webb, a policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project, identifies another factor. In a new research paper provided exclusively to the Prospect, Webb notes that, between 2002 and 2013, New York City closed 22 hospitals adding up to 6,000 beds. That’s equivalent to six Comfort ships, or six Javits centers. It includes facilities in each of the five boroughs: Flatbush General Hospital (Brooklyn), St. Vincent’s Midtown (Manhattan), St. John’s Queens, SVCMC Staten Island, and Westchester Square Medical Center (The Bronx).