Queens, NY – At Elmhurst Hospital, a patient now dies every seventeen minutes from the coronavirus.
FDNY vehicles
There are these usually crowded sidewalks, now deserted. The homeless, whom we barely discerned a few days ago in the anthill of Manhattan, and who impose themselves on the eye, reigning on a piece of macadam on the fringes of a society attacked by a killer virus. And then there are the sirens. These hoots of FDNY vehicles (firefighters) and ambulances, a familiar link in New York DNA, no longer have anything to do with the American dream. Each tornado reminds the cloistered residents, the unconscious joggers and walkers who continue to claim a normal life, that at the back of the vehicle, a patient fights for his life, in a state of acute respiratory distress.
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Even a semblance of normal life no longer exists around the Elmhurst Hospital in Queens – the neighborhood most exposed to the pandemic. As the tabloid New York Post notes on its front page, a patient now dies every seventeen minutes, and no longer at the rate of one per hour, as was still the case on Friday.
“Team 700” code
Overwhelmed with severe cases, doctors and nurses no longer have a single bed, out of the 545 in the establishment, to offer to newcomers. With barely a few dozen respirators, they have to deal with so many deaths in intensive care that a simple code passed through the loudspeakers, ” team 700 “, means that you have to come and take a body. In the basement, the morgue is full.
Refrigerated Truck
So much so that a refrigerated truck is now parked outside to accommodate the overflow. ” It’s apocalyptic, ” says a young doctor, Ashley Bray, 27, worried like her peers that the exponential peak of the epidemic, expected within two weeks in New York, does not meet, or even exceeds in proportion, the scenario observed in Wuhan in China and Lombardy (northern Italy). With 776 intramural deaths, the toll is already hefty for the world city, where the reserves of medical equipment will be exhausted within a week.
Tripled salary
The rare good news struggles to smile at the millions of city-dwellers voluntarily confined to their homes, in the absence of a general curfew, an extreme measure which the governor of the state, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, who fears “a war, refuses. Civil” in this crowded New York tower of Babel. Hundreds of nurses are expected to reinforce the four corners of the Country, recruited at 100 dollars an hour (90 euros), wages tripled to cope with the shortage of nursing staff. In Central Park, the evangelical Christian organization Samaritan’s Purse of Franklin Graham, the son of the legendary and late televangelist Billy Graham, hastily erects a forest of tents on the lawn, which will eventually be able to accommodate 68 patients with its beds equipped with respirators.
USNS Comfort
A drop in the ocean, much like this hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, arrived in New York Bay on Monday morning. Moored on the West Side, in Manhattan, it will unload the hospitals overwhelmed by the Big Apple, with its 1000 beds not equipped with respirators. Ditto for the four additional field hospitals announced by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, including the one that comes out of the ground at the cruise ship terminal in Red Hook (Brooklyn), usually reserved for the liner Queen Mary 2.
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In these decisive, historical hours, where the fate of a city and its people is at stake, how many are they to have left New York, since the ” patient zero, “a nurse returning from Iran, landed, feverish, at JFK airport at the end of February? The wealthiest, those with a second home in the Catskills Mountains to the north, or in the Hamptons, on Long Island have already packed up. However, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on Saturday called on residents of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to ” avoid non-essential travel for the next 14 days with immediate effect”.
