New York City has really been hit hard by the coronavirus, so much so that people are dying while still waiting hospital beds in the emergency room.
Here’s a snapshot by the New York Times on what’s going on at one of the main coronavirus hospitals:
NY TIMES – 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 38-year-old who reminded the doctor of her fiancé. All had tested positive for the 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 a facility 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 Dr. Bray, 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 health care systems in China, Italy and other countries. On Wednesday morning, New York City reported 16,788 confirmed cases and 199 deaths.
The entire state of New York reported 30,811 cases today, which means New York City has well over half of the cases in the state. According to Bing’s new coronavirus map, they are up to almost 18k at the time of this post:
Honestly, this virus sounds more like pneumonia than it does the flu. Here’s a depiction from the LA Times of what coronavirus does to the lungs in older people, which matches what we are hearing out of doctors in New York:
