In hard-hit N.J., hospitals are ‘frenetic all the time now’
Twelve doctors at her hospital and the chief executive were sickened with the coronavirus. One colleague had died. Patients as young as 19 were being placed on ventilators.
But Michele Acito, the director of nursing at Holy Name Medical Center, in the hardest-hit town in New Jersey’s hardest-hit county, felt like she was holding up. Then her mother-in-law, sister-inlaw and brother-in-law arrived.
The disease that has crippled New York City is now enveloping New Jersey’s densely packed cities and suburbs. The state’s governor said Friday that New Jersey was about a week behind New York, where scenes of panicked doctors have gripped the nation.
Hospitals in the state are scrambling to convert cafeterias and pediatric wings into intensive care units. Ventilators are running low. One in three nursing homes has at least one resident with the virus.
At Holy Name in Teaneck, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, two doctors are among the 150 patients being treated for the virus. The ages of the 41 people on ventilators one day last week ranged from 19 to 90.
Twenty patients died in 72 hours. One of them was Edna Acito, Michele Acito’s mother-in-law.
She had turned 89 on Thursday. It was a bittersweet day, with a team of medical workers singing “Happy Birthday to You” from the hallway, just outside a modified door made from plastic sheathing and a zipper.
No visitors were allowed in. But the older woman’s nine children expressed their love through an iPad as Michele Acito held her hand. Edna Acito died early Saturday. “You compartmentalize. You go home. You shower it off,” Michele Acito, 57, said. “But when you have a family member here, you can’t scrub that off.”
As of Sunday, at least 917 people in New Jersey had died of the virus, and 37,505 had been infected. New Jersey has the nation’s second-highest number of cases after New York.
“We’re eyeball deep inside the surge,” said Dr. Dan Varga, the chief physician executive at Hackensack Meridian Health, which runs Hackensack University Medical Center and 16 other hospitals in New Jersey.
On Friday, Gov. Philip Murphy ordered that all flags be flown at half-staff. “Behave as though you’ve got it,” he said, adding, “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
Two hospitals notified state officials last week that they had run out of ventilators, the lifesaving devices that do the lungs’ work. One reported that it was nearly out of a medicine used to sedate patients on ventilators.
That same day, Mr. Murphy and New Jersey’s health commissioner explained the state’s provisional plans to move refrigerated trucks to some hospitals where the morgues were quickly filling with bodies.
“The fact that we’re having this conversation, folks — this is real,” said Mr. Murphy, who enacted a statewide stayat-home order just over two weeks ago.
New Jersey’s fatality and infection rates are still dwarfed by New York’s, where, as of Sunday, more than 122,000 people had been infected and more than 4,100 had died. The virus appeared to be spreading fastest in Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, where there were more than 27,000 cases, only about 10,000 fewer than in all of New Jersey.
The outbreak in New Jersey is most serious in Bergen County, the state’s most populous county. It has recorded 6,187 confirmed virus cases and at least 189 deaths.
Mr. Murphy, a Democrat who has spoken frequently of his willingness to work with President Donald Trump to get supplies and funding needed to save lives during the outbreak, has stressed the state’s pressing need for more ventilators and personal protective equipment.
About 650 ventilators have been sent to New Jersey from the national stockpile, but many more are needed if hospitalization rates in the state continue to climb. Fourteen of the devices had either missing or nonfunctioning parts, state officials said on Friday.
Dr. Adam D. Jarrett, Holy Name’s chief medical officer, said he had been calling medical personnel he knows around the country to come help. The hospital has begun preparing to treat as many as 100 critically ill patients at once in one of four new intensive-care areas it created in the past few weeks.
New Jersey officials have also issued a plea for volunteers with medical training; as of Friday, 7,539 people had offered to help.
“Whenever you go to a busy hospital, the emergency department can go from busy to OK to frenetic,” Dr. Jarrett said. “We’re frenetic all the time now.”