Cacophony of coughing in packed virus-besieged ERs

A CACOPHONY of coughing in packed emergency rooms. Beds squeezed in wherever there is space. Overworked, sleep-deprived doctors and nurses rationed to one face mask a day and worried about a dwindling number of available ventilators.

Such is the reality inside New York’s hospitals, which have become a warzone-like epicentre of the US’s coronavirus crisis.

Faced with an infection rate that is five times that of the rest of the country, health workers are putting themselves at risk to fight a tide of sickness amid a shortage of supplies, and promises of help from the government that have yet to fully materialise.

“You’re on 100% of the time, no matter what,” said Jolion McGreevy, medical director of The Mount Sinai Hospital emergency department. “It’s been a month of full force, and that’s certainly very stressful.”

Patients initially showed up with mild symptoms ranging from a runny nose to mild fever. That shifted over the past week, McGreevy said, and now hospitals are receiving far sicker patients in need of dire intervention. “We knew it was coming…

We saw it in Italy and other places so we were prepared for it, and now we’re seeing it.”

Nearly 14 800 in the city have been diagnosed with the virus as of Tuesday, accounting for more than half the cases in the hardest-hit state in the US.

More than 2 800 were hospitalised because of the virus – double the figure from three days earlier – and more than 600 were in intensive care.

The death toll rose to 192, and officials have warned it will get worse before it gets better.

“We are not slowing

it, and

it

is accelerating on its own,” said Governor Andrew Cuomo, predicting the state could be as close as two weeks away from seeing 40 000 patients in intensive care, which would overwhelm hospitals that now have just 3 000 intensive-care unit beds across the state.

“One of the forecasters said we were looking at a freight train coming across the country. We’re now looking at a bullet train,” he said.

Bristling at US President Donald Trump’s notion that Americans should be prepared to go back to work in weeks for the sake of the economy, Cuomo said that would essentially sacrifice the lives of the elderly and the most frail. “That’s not the American way, that’s not the New York way.”

Cuomo also appeared to mock the government for congratulating itself for sending the city 400 ventilators from the national stockpile. “What am I going to do with 400 ventilators when I need 30 000?” he asked.

Khalid Amin, a doctor at the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, treated seven Covid-19 patients on Tuesday, ranging from age 25 to 72, and he is struck by the way the disease has laid each low in the same way – fatigue, and grasping for air with the slightest movement.

Craig Spencer, who survived a bout of Ebola in 2014 and is now director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Centre, tweeted this week of a “cacophony of coughing” in the ER. “You’re afraid to take off the mask,” he wrote.“The more we hear about doctors and nurses getting sick, the more we get nervous,” said Eric Cioe-Pena, director of global health at Northwell Health. | AP