As New York City struggles to cope with the surging number of Covid-19 cases, a doctor has released footage of the dire conditions inside her Queens hospital – raising the alarm about the scale of the epidemic and the shortage of critical equipment needed to save lives.
Dr Colleen Smith works at Elmhurst Hospital, which this week saw 13 coronavirus-related deaths in a single day. The hospital has begun transferring out non-Covid patients to other hospitals in order to clear space for the sheer number of people arriving needing urgent treatment.
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In the film, which she released to the New York Times, Dr Smith walks through a packed ICU unit, saying “all the patients that you see, they all have Covid. It feels like it’s too little too late. We knew it was coming.”
“Today is kind of getting worse and worse. We had to get a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of patients who are dying. We are right now scrambling to try and get a few additional ventilators, or even CPAP machines. If we got CPAP machines, we could free up ventilators for patients who need them.”
New York is struggling to close a serious and escalating shortfall in ventilator machines. Governor Andrew Cuomo has said the state needs tens of thousands more – a request Donald Trump has dismissed as excessive.
In her video, Dr Smith shows five new ventilators received by the hospital, saying it needed many more. “We now have these five vents – unless people die, I suspect we’ll be back to needing to beg for ventilators again in another day or two.”
New York City’s hospitals are struggling not just to treat patients but to protect health workers themselves. Kious Jordan Kelly, a 48-year-old nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, died on 24 March after working directly with coronavirus patients. Pictures have emerged of staff at the hospital using inadequate protective equipment, and even plastic rubbish bags.
Dr Smith’s video from Elmhurst captures both the scale of what’s happening now and the alarmingly steep trajectory along which the epidemic is moving. Among the changes she is seeing as the epidemic progresses, she says, is the shifting demographic of the patients entering hospital.
“Many of the young people who are getting sick don’t smoke, they’re healthy, they have no comorbidities … they’re just young, regular people between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect to get this sick.”
Based on what she’s seeing, Dr Smith says, the prognosis for New York’s health services and its sickened people is dire.
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“I don’t have the support that I need, and even just the materials that I need physically to take care of my patients. And it’s America. And we’re supposed to be a first-world country.
“I don’t really care if I get in trouble for speaking to the media. I want people to know that this is bad, people are dying, we don’t have the tools that we need in the emergency department and in the hospital to take care of them.” At this point, she begins to cry. “And it’s really hard.”
KtanKtanKtan on March 29th, 2020 at 10:15 UTC »
EDIT: Here’s a much better link:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000007052136/coronavirus-elmhurst-hospital-queens.html
Transcript from NYT website for people who can’t watch the video: (EDIT: BUT, I REALLY encourage you to watch the video to get across the horror. In this case the following words just don’t do it justice)
“[Machine beeping] “The frustrating thing about all of this is it really just feels like it’s too little, too late. Like we knew — we knew it was coming. Today is kind of getting worse and worse. We had to get a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of patients who are dying. We are, right now, scrambling to try to get a few additional ventilators or even CPAP machines. If we could get CPAP machines, we could free up ventilators for patients who need them. You know, we now have these five vents. We probably — unless people die, I suspect we’ll be back to needing to beg for ventilators again in another day or two. There’s a mythical 100 vents out there which we haven’t seen. Leaders in various offices, from the president to the head of Health and Hospitals, saying things like, ‘We’re going to be fine. Everything’s fine.’ And from our perspective, everything is not fine. I don’t have the support that I need, and even just the materials that I need, physically, to take care of my patients. And it’s America, and we’re supposed to be a first-world country. On a regular day, my emergency department’s volume is pretty high. It’s about 200 people a day. Now we’re seeing 400 or more people a day. At first, we were trying to isolate patients with cough and fever and be more careful around them, but we weren’t necessarily being extra careful around all the other patients. And then we started to realize that patients who were coming in with no fever but abdominal pain actually had findings on their X-rays and chest CTs that were consistent with this coronavirus, Covid-19. So someone in a car accident gets brought in and we get a CT scan of them, and their lungs look like they have coronavirus. We were seeing a lot of patients who probably had Covid, but we didn’t realize. Ten residents and also many, many of our nurses and a few of the attending physicians got sick. The anxiety of this situation is really overwhelming. All of the doctors, it’s hard for us to get tested even if we want to, even if we have symptoms. We’re exposed over and over again. We don’t have the protective equipment that we should have. I put on one N95 mask in the morning. I need to have that N95 mask on for every patient I see. I don’t take it off all day. The N95 mask I wore today is also the N95 mask I wore on Friday. We’re always worried that we’ll be out of N95 masks. What’s a little bit scary now is the patients that we’re getting are much sicker. Many of the young people who are getting sick don’t smoke, they’re healthy, they have no co-morbidities. They’re just young, regular people between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect to get this sick. So many people are saying it’s going to be OK, everything’s fine, we have what we need. And if this goes on for a month or two or three or five like it did in China, and we’re already this strained, we don’t have what we need. I don’t really care if I get in trouble for speaking to the media. I want people to know that this is bad. People are dying. We don’t have the tools that we need in the emergency department and in the hospital to take care of them, and — and it’s really hard.””
yourclitsbff on March 29th, 2020 at 07:58 UTC »
-Carl Sagan
We need honesty. Downplaying the severity of things will only keep us unprepared to face the invisible enemy at hand. Not only invisible from asymptomatic infected people, but also from lack of testing.
TheloniousMonk15 on March 29th, 2020 at 06:43 UTC »
I give massive respect to this doctor for showing this video. She is probably going to get fired within the next few days. This situation is FUCKED.