2020/05 People Are Dying’: 72 Hours Inside a N.Y.C. Hospital Battling Coronavirus

 

All the patients in this room,all the feet that you see, they all have Covid. 

 

All the patients in this room,all the feet that you see, they all have Covid.

[Machine beeping] “The frustrating thing about all of this is it really just feels like it’s too little, too late. Like we knew — we knew it was coming. 

 

Today is kind of getting worse and worse. We had to get a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of patients who are dying. We are, right now, scrambling to try to get a few additional ventilators or even CPAP machines.

scramble: 서둘러 하다 (긴급으로)

 

If we could get CPAP machines, we could free up ventilators for patients who need them. You know, we now have these five vents. We probably — unless people die, I suspect we’ll be back to needing to beg for ventilators again in another day or two.

free up:~을 해방하다, 풀어주다, 해소하다

 

There’s a mythical 100 vents out there which we haven’t seen. Leaders in various offices, from the president to the head of Health and Hospitals, saying things like, ‘We’re going to be fine. Everything’s fine.’ And from our perspective, everything is not fine.

mythical : 가공의 사실이아닌

 

I don’t have the support that I need, and even just the materials that I need, physically, to take care of my patients. And it’s America, and we’re supposed to be a first-world country.

 

On a regular day, my emergency department’s volume is pretty high. It’s about 200 people a day. Now we’re seeing 400 or more people a day.

 

At first, we were trying to isolate patients with cough and fever and be more careful around them, but we weren’t necessarily being extra careful around all the other patients.

necessarily: 어쩔수없이, 필연적으로

 

And then we started to realize that patients who were coming in with no fever but abdominal pain actually had findings on their X-rays and chest CTs that were consistent with this coronavirus, Covid-19. So someone in a car accident gets brought in and we get a CT scan of them, and their lungs look like they have coronavirus.

abdominal: 복부

finding: 결과, 결론

lung: 폐

 

We were seeing a lot of patients who probably had Covid, but we didn’t realize. Ten residents and also many, many of our nurses and a few of the attending physicians got sick.

physician: 내과의사

 

The anxiety of this situation is really overwhelming. All of the doctors, it’s hard for us to get tested even if we want to, even if we have symptoms. We’re exposed over and over again.

expose: 드러내다, 폭로하다, 노출시키다

 

We don’t have the protective equipment that we should have. I put on one N95 mask in the morning. I need to have that N95 mask on for every patient I see. I don’t take it off all day.

The N95 mask I wore today is also the N95 mask I wore on Friday. We’re always worried that we’ll be out of N95 masks. What’s a little bit scary now is the patients that we’re getting are much sicker.

 

Many of the young people who are getting sick don’t smoke, they’re healthy, they have no co-morbidities. They’re just young, regular people between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect to get this sick.

morbidity: 병적상태, 사망률

 

So many people are saying it’s going to be OK, everything’s fine, we have what we need. And if this goes on for a month or two or three or five like it did in China, and we’re already this strained, we don’t have what we need.

strain: 부담, 압박감, 한계를주다, 무리를주다

 

I don’t really care if I get in trouble for speaking to the media. I want people to know that this is bad. People are dying. We don’t have the tools that we need in the emergency department and in the hospital to take care of them, and — and it’s really hard.”

 

www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000007052136/coronavirus-elmhurst-hospital-queens.html?playlistId=video/Most-Viewe

Video: ‘People Are Dying’: 72 Hours Inside a N.Y.C. Hospital Battling Coronavirus