As always, the first responders and the medical people on the front-lines bear the brunt of the disease..I believe this to be a sombre peek into the future for most metro areas..and many rural medical centers as well. Some areas will get off relatively unscathed--those that are taking it seriously right now--but we are already running out of both trained personnel and supplies--and it is still early days.
I see many on the Right almost gleeful at the situation that NYC or LA are in right now..not having the brains to connect the dots and realize that it is just a matter of time before the Red states find that their rural areas are aflame..and there is no water left to put out the fire. I see posts here where idiots blame ventilators for deaths, rather than the disease--ignoring that the patient was put on the ventilator because they were dying in the first place. I see wacky conspiracy threads blaming the Chinese, the Russians and, above all, the left! To me, it's all just whistling past the graveyard--one month from now, hundreds of thousands will be dead. Most of the dead will be over 60...some will not. But I think it's clear that a disproportionate number will be in the medical field--thus reducing our ability to respond effectively.
Like generals steadying their troops before battle, hospital supervisors in New York have had to rally, cajole and sometimes threaten workers.
“Our health care systems are at war with a pandemic virus,” Craig R. Smith, the surgeon-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, wrote in an email to staff on March 16, the day after New York City shut down its school system to contain the virus. “You are expected to keep fighting with whatever weapons you’re capable of working.”
“Sick is relative,” he wrote, adding that workers would not even be tested for the virus unless they were “unequivocally exposed and symptomatic to the point of needing admission to the hospital.”
“That means you come to work,” he wrote. “Period.”
Arriving to work each day, doctors and nurses are met with confusion and chaos.
At a branch of the Montefiore hospital system in the Bronx, nurses wear their winter coats in an unheated tent set up to triage patients with symptoms, while at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, patients are sometimes dying before they can be moved into beds.
The inviolable rules that once gave a sense of rhythm and harmony to even the busiest emergency rooms have in some cases been cast aside. Few things have caused more anxiety than shifting protocols meant to preserve a dwindling supply of protective gear.
When the pandemic first hit New York, medical workers changed gowns and masks each time they visited an infected patient. Then, they were told to keep their protective gear on until the end of their shift. As supplies became even more scarce, one doctor working on an intensive care unit said he was asked to turn in his mask and face shield at the end of his shift to be sterilized for future use. Others are being told to store their masks in a paper bag between shifts.
“It puts us in danger, it puts our patients in danger. I can’t believe in the United States that’s what’s happening,” said Kelley Cabrera, an emergency room nurse at Jacobi Medical Center.
An emergency room doctor at Long Island Jewish Medical Center put it more bluntly: “It’s literally, wash your hands a lot, cross your fingers, pray.”
Doctors and nurses fear they could be transmitting the virus to their patients, compounding the crisis by transforming hospitals into incubators for the virus.
I see many on the Right almost gleeful at the situation that NYC or LA are in right now..not having the brains to connect the dots and realize that it is just a matter of time before the Red states find that their rural areas are aflame..and there is no water left to put out the fire. I see posts here where idiots blame ventilators for deaths, rather than the disease--ignoring that the patient was put on the ventilator because they were dying in the first place. I see wacky conspiracy threads blaming the Chinese, the Russians and, above all, the left! To me, it's all just whistling past the graveyard--one month from now, hundreds of thousands will be dead. Most of the dead will be over 60...some will not. But I think it's clear that a disproportionate number will be in the medical field--thus reducing our ability to respond effectively.
Like generals steadying their troops before battle, hospital supervisors in New York have had to rally, cajole and sometimes threaten workers.
“Our health care systems are at war with a pandemic virus,” Craig R. Smith, the surgeon-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, wrote in an email to staff on March 16, the day after New York City shut down its school system to contain the virus. “You are expected to keep fighting with whatever weapons you’re capable of working.”
“Sick is relative,” he wrote, adding that workers would not even be tested for the virus unless they were “unequivocally exposed and symptomatic to the point of needing admission to the hospital.”
“That means you come to work,” he wrote. “Period.”
Arriving to work each day, doctors and nurses are met with confusion and chaos.
At a branch of the Montefiore hospital system in the Bronx, nurses wear their winter coats in an unheated tent set up to triage patients with symptoms, while at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, patients are sometimes dying before they can be moved into beds.
The inviolable rules that once gave a sense of rhythm and harmony to even the busiest emergency rooms have in some cases been cast aside. Few things have caused more anxiety than shifting protocols meant to preserve a dwindling supply of protective gear.
When the pandemic first hit New York, medical workers changed gowns and masks each time they visited an infected patient. Then, they were told to keep their protective gear on until the end of their shift. As supplies became even more scarce, one doctor working on an intensive care unit said he was asked to turn in his mask and face shield at the end of his shift to be sterilized for future use. Others are being told to store their masks in a paper bag between shifts.
“It puts us in danger, it puts our patients in danger. I can’t believe in the United States that’s what’s happening,” said Kelley Cabrera, an emergency room nurse at Jacobi Medical Center.
An emergency room doctor at Long Island Jewish Medical Center put it more bluntly: “It’s literally, wash your hands a lot, cross your fingers, pray.”
Doctors and nurses fear they could be transmitting the virus to their patients, compounding the crisis by transforming hospitals into incubators for the virus.
