Battlingacovid-19surge
Bay Area doctor volunteers at New York hospital overwhelmed by coronavirus
Before the coronavirus hit Sutter Delta Medical Center in Antioch where he works as an emergency physician, Tom Sugarman spent his days tending to people hurt in car accidents or suffering from heart attacks. His focus shifted several months ago when people with COVID-19 began arriving at the hospital. In April, he was further immersed into the pandemic when he traveled to hard-hit New York City with colleagues from Vituity, an organization that provides staff for a number of Bay Area hospitals.
Q What was it like when the coronavirus outbreak hit the Bay Area? A Our hospital saw one of the earlier cases of community spread of COVID in the Bay Area. Even prior to that happening, we’d changed around the physical structure and the operational structure of our emergency department. We had a lot of effort for every single patient because of the need to try to keep everybody — both patients and staff — safe. At the same time, we started seeing a decline in the number of patients coming in. But the amount of work involved in taking care of the patients who were there went up. That’s what we were observing in early March when New York’s situation was exploding into a crisis.
Q How did you end up going to New York and what was that like?
A We were put in touch through some intermediaries with the governor’s office, who asked that our group provide some doctors to go to New York to do really a twofold mission. One was to provide relief to the encumbered New York physicians and other health care workers who were working so hard in such dire circumstances. And the second point was to try to bring back to California knowledge and expertise of how to respond to this crisis and potentially other crises that could have some similarities. In my particular circumstance, I went to Elmhurst Hospital in Queens and worked in an intensive care unit, or something that had been cast as an intensive care unit. Originally, it had been a step down unit, but they had massively expanded their intensive care unit capabilities — going from approximately 30 beds PRE-COVID up to about 170.
“I was aware before I got to New York that people were going to have kidney problems, they were going to have blood clotting problems, stroke problems. Mut what I was a bit surprised by is by the time patients got in the ICU and were critically ill, they essentially had all those problems.”
— Tom Sugarman