An ‘apocalyptic’ virus surge at NYC hospital,
A person is unloaded from an ambulance outside of Elmhurst Hospital Center in New York on Wednesday.
NEW YORK
In several hours on Tuesday, Dr. Ashley Bray performed chest compressions at Elmhurst Hospital Center on a woman in her 80s, a man in his 60s and a 38year-old who reminded the doctor of her fiancé. All had tested positive for the new coronavirus and had gone into cardiac arrest. All eventually died.
Elmhurst, a 545-bed public hospital in Queens, has begun transferring patients not suffering from coronavirus to other facilities as it moves toward becoming one dedicated entirely to the outbreak. Doctors and nurses have struggled to make do with a few dozen ventilators. Calls over a loudspeaker of “Team 700,” the code for when a patient is on the verge of death, come several times a shift. Some have died inside the emergency room while waiting for a bed.
A refrigerated truck has been stationed outside to hold the bodies of the dead. Over the past 24 hours, New York City’s public hospital system said in a statement, 13 people at Elmhurst had died.
“It’s apocalyptic,” said Bray, 27, a general medicine resident at the hospital.
Across the city, which has become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, hospitals are beginning to confront the kind of harrowing surge in cases that has overwhelmed healthcare systems in China, Italy and other countries. On Wednesday morning, New York City reported 16,788 confirmed cases and 199 deaths.
More than 2,800 coronavirus patients have been hospitalized in the city. Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday offered a glimmer of hope that social-distancing measures were starting to slow the growth in hospitalizations. Still, hospitals are preparing for a major influx.
This week, the state’s hospitalization estimations were down markedly, from a doubling of cases every two days to every four days. It is “almost too good to be true,” Cuomo said.
Working with state and federal officials, hospitals have repeatedly expanded the portions of their facilities equipped to handle patients who had stayed home until worsening fevers and difficulty breathing forced them into emergency rooms.
Dr. Mitchell Katz, the head of the Health and Hospitals Corp., which operates New York City’s public hospitals, said plans were underway to transform many areas of the Elmhurst hospital into intensive care units for extremely sick patients.
But New York’s hospitals may be about to lose their leeway for creativity in finding spaces.
All of the more than 1,800 intensive care units in New York City are expected to be full by Friday, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency briefing obtained by The New York Times. Patients could stay for weeks, limiting space for newly sickened people.
The federal government is sending a 1,000-bed hospital ship to New York, although it is not scheduled to arrive until mid-April. Officials have begun erecting four 250-bed hospitals at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Midtown Manhattan, which could be ready in a week.
Officials have also discussed converting hotels and arenas into temporary medical facilities.
In interviews, doctors and nurses at hospitals across the city gave accounts of how they were being stretched toward a breaking point.
Workers at several hospitals, including the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, said employees such as obstetrician-gynecologists and radiologists have been called to work in emergency wards.
At a branch of the Montefiore Medical Center, also in the Bronx, there have been one or two coronavirusrelated deaths a day, or more, said Judy SheridanGonzalez, a nurse. There are not always enough gurneys, so some patients sit in chairs. One patient on Sunday had been without a bed for 36 hours, she said.