The view from the E.R.: ‘We’re all drowning’
“I’ve done disaster medicine trips before,” Dr. Celine Thum told Yahoo News. “I volunteered in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and it was also the same kind of feeling, where we had limited resources and we did what we could. The surreal part of this response is that I’m at a large hospital with every specialty and the thought is this should be an environment where we have every resource.”
The limit on supplies isn’t just a shortage of PPE: Thum said they are running short on everything from nurses to beds, making it feel “very much like war-time medicine.” Thum said the magnitude of the pandemic in New York City is so great that the decision on what precautions to take is now obvious: You wear every piece of PPE you can obtain. “Cities who are not yet where we are have to understand that because otherwise they’re going to lose a lot of their workforce,” she said.“We’re operating in emergency setting. We protect ourselves and we save as many patients as we can with what we have.
The city is adding bed capacity as fast as it can, with makeshift hospitals at the Javits Convention Center, in tents in Central Park and aboard the Navy hospital ship the Comfort. While those are intended to house the overflow of patients without the virus, Thum thinks COVID cases will eventually take over even those spaces.
On Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city needed 3.3 million N95 masks, 2.1 million surgical mask, 100,000 isolation gowns and 400 ventilators by Sunday. De Blasio said the city will need 15,000 ventilators and an additional 65,000 hospital beds by the end of April.“They need to see reinforcements come, they need to see some downtime,” de Blasio said. “They need a chance to get some downtime to finally recover.
Thum is frustrated by the spread of misinformation about coronavirus, such as the idea that social distancing is an overreaction. “The idea that it’s not really that contagious, that if you don’t have symptoms you’re fine. Everyone probably has the idea that they’re not going to get it, especially when they’re in a city that hasn’t been hit as hard.
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