`Do you need anything else?`, he asked.
`Will there be more high-flow oxygen machines ?`, a doctor spoke up.
Dr. Marshall, head of the Maimonides center’s emergency department, reassured colleagues that a dozen or more machines would be arriving soon and that they were continuing to order more.
The need for ventilators is urgent when Maimonides as well as many other hospitals in the epidemic epicenter of New York City witness an escalation in the number of nCoV infections.
`I think the big unknown, the one thing you hear people say, is we don’t know how high the peak will be,` Marshall said.
Intensive Care Unit X at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn on March 25.
In the emergency room, Covid-19 patients sit against pillows or lie on white ambulance stretchers, separated from each other by curtains.
Like many other hospitals in the city, Maimonides has banned visits from patients’ families to prevent infection, making the hospital less stressful.
In the emergency room, medical staff wearing gas masks and goggles are working at beds placed close together.
Before the pandemic, this area of the emergency department specialized in treating people with strokes or severe trauma.
Every day since early March, or maybe since February, Marshall, who graduated from medical school in 1995, has been on duty at the hospital, when the first Covid-19 patients were admitted.
With more than 700 beds, Maimonides is the largest hospital in Brooklyn, the most populous borough in New York City.
Brooklyn has recorded 4,656 people infected with nCoV, accounting for 28% of the city’s infections, according to data released by New York officials on March 25.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently asked hospitals to increase their capacity to receive patients by 50% and expected the number of hospital beds needed statewide to reach 140,000, of which 40,000 intensive care beds (ICU).
Maimonides Hospital is aiming much higher.
The hospital is quickly restructuring to respond to Covid-19.
Maimonides is considering converting the outpatient surgery area, a non-emergency surgery area, into a place to receive Covid-19 patients.
Outside the hospital, staff also set up a temporary tent area with a capacity of about 100 beds.
`We’ve spent millions of dollars getting ready for this war. If all the federal government bailouts go to cruise ships and hospitals get nothing, it would be terrible`
The hospital’s horseshoe-shaped emergency department is divided into a `hot zone` and a `cold zone.`
Marshall wants these two areas to be separated further or fenced to prevent nCoV infection, but the number of patients is increasing.
On the upper floor of Intensive Care Unit X, severe Covid-19 cases are in closed rooms.
In the room, a female patient lies prone.
`Look, it would be great if you didn’t have to find a way to intubate any patients. Instead, we could consider local lung clearing,` Marshall told the two doctors in
`Yes, we’re doing that,` one doctor said.
Marshall said the hospital just received 15 additional ventilators and has 30 spares at this time.
The volunteer group Hatzolah of Boro Park donated ventilators to Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn on March 25.
Like all hospitals in the city, Maimonides is racing to source equipment.
If the hospital runs out of ventilators, doctors will have to make difficult decisions when choosing which patients to treat.
`We are having to prepare for situations like that right now. A doctor on the front line of fighting the epidemic, having to stand between two patients with only one ventilator left and not knowing what to do, is something
Good news at the hospital is unlikely to come in the coming days, as medical staff prepare to respond to the peak of the epidemic.
`I’m afraid you won’t be able to take your eyes off my little pediatric emergency room,` one doctor joked to Marshall as he walked through the area.
Thanh Tam (According to WSJ)