'Before it started, we expected it was going to come here and that it was going to be bad, and we knew it was overwhelming, but I didn’t imagine it was going to be like this. It’s worse than I thought.'
Photo: Patrick Schnell M.D As the COVID-19 crisis continues to unfold, the medical staff at Mount Sinai Brooklyn is providing regular dispatches about the daily experience fighting the virus. While there have been glimmers of good news lately, with indications that New York’s curve may be close to flattening, doctors on the front lines are still living a nightmare. Dr. Adam Brenner runs the ICU at Mount Sinai Brooklyn.
Rationing ventilators hasn’t been an issue yet. We have enough protective materials, and we’ve had help in terms of staffing, but there’s no other disease in our lifetime where you see 170, 180 patients in the hospital with the same disease. We still just don’t have the staffing or the space for everyone. We had a 12-bed ICU, we opened up a second 12-bed ICU, and yet we still have 15 to 20 patients in the hospital that we need to find a place for.
The elderly patients seem to be the ones that just kind of die right away. The ones we’re seeing in the ICU who are just kind of lingering on the vents and not getting any better, or the ones who die after kind of a week or so, are the 50-to-60-year-old patients. They’re not that old. We’ve also seen some younger patients with comorbidities that have not done well. It’s horrible, they’re dying by themselves, we don’t have enough time to update the families as well as they deserve.
We were able to take our first two people off ventilators today, and so far they are doing okay. That was a big emotional hump for us. But not many. That’s two out of the 40-some patients total who have come in and out of our ICU, not including the patients on the floor that we haven’t been able to take care of in the right way.
This whole experience has definitely been traumatizing. All we really have with this disease is supportive care. It makes me think about what we’re really doing — if we’re really doing good for people by just prolonging their death, when it’s just going to end up in mortality anyway.
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