My cousin works in an er in one of 2 hospitals in an Ohio city with just under 100k people. There has been a trend where arresting officers are taking people to the hospital to essentially sober up often without charging them , instead of taking them to jail.

An Er doctor who used to be a police officer has no idea why they aren't charging them and sending them to jail instead. It ends up taking a lot of time and resources that both the jail and hospital are equiped to handle. The county jail has much less costs associated with sobering up the intoxicated (alcohol, meth, heroin, etc) then the hospital. Hospitals are constantly losing nurses to traveling Jon's making up to 9k a week, as a result they are forced to pay 100 plus per hour of over time. It's a massive supply constraint during a pandemic on the vector that cant spare any thing atm (healthcare) .

This is leading to up to 18 hour wait times for the people actually sick before they can go back to see someone.

Possible explanations I can think of