Costa Rica's public hospitals overwhelmed, with patients waiting up to eight days for beds

Mostly no, though staffing is one piece. The Tico Times report says the CCSS audit found shortages, but it doesn't show how much of the crowding each cause explains, so I can't rank them from that article alone. The more useful way to see it is as a chain. Patients who have been admitted but have no inpatient bed stay in the emergency ward, which fills the space for the next arrivals. At Hospital México the director says 60 to 70 patients wait for admission on a typical day, and about 80% of them were already there the day before. That is a bed-flow problem, and adding ward staff alone wouldn't clear it. A second factor is demand that doesn't need an emergency room. A 2025 review by Percy Guzman in the Open Journal of Applied Sciences, using 2023 data from three San José hospitals, found that 52.34% of national emergency visits were classed as non-urgent, and 36.67% at Hospital México. That is a review of one year's records, not a controlled study, so it shows the pattern, not its size today. Seasonal surges add to this. On October 26 the Tico Times reported that the children's hospital ICU was full during a respiratory-virus season. For the detail behind the audit, the CCSS audit itself would settle the question better than news coverage.