“As hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients and the coronavirus infected physicians and nurses, state medical boards took a hands-off approach to doctor discipline: Emergency actions against doctors’ licenses dropped 59% from April through June of this year compared with the same period last year,” USA Today (9/8, O’Donnell, 10.31M) reports. Emergency license “suspensions and restrictions dropped 85% in April alone, according to the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, which administers the National Practitioner Data Bank and provided the analysis to USA TODAY.” The drop “in emergency license suspensions worries patient safety advocates because many hospitals still have compromised and vulnerable patients. That makes errors and complications more likely and dangerous.”

From the news release of the American Association for Justice.