Not Broadway, not Times Square, not Central Park. With most of its shops closed, its streets deserted and its most emblematic places completely devoid of life, the icon that best represents New York today is the USNS Comfort hospital ship, which has been docked for almost two weeks off the coast of what until not long ago was the most cosmopolitan city in the world. Today The United States is by far the country with the most detected cases of infection by the new coronavirus and it has already displaced Italy in the number of victims. And within this country, New York is the city most punished.
There, there is an Argentine doctor fighting on the front lines of the battle against the coronavirus. Jorge Mercado is 43 years old and is the director of the Pulmonary Service of the NYU Langone Hospital de Brooklyn. Both there and from home through telemedicine, he treats hundreds of infected patients every day while also directing the medical team.
“There are many things that impact me on a medical level about what is happening with this virus. For example, how can you be wanting to calculate mortality in the middle of the pandemic or how a small study suddenly seems to determine what drugs should be treated That is very frustrating as a doctor. And also that of adults and comorbidities: half of the people that we have in intensive care are under 65 years of age and without pathologies. With 25 or 30 years you can bear the scourge of virus, but that does not mean that young people do not die, “says Mercado from New York.
After graduating in 2001 at the Buenos Aires’ University, Mercado traveled to the United States to do the residency. There he specialized in pulmonary and intensive therapy. After working in different hospitals in various cities, he arrived in New York four years ago hired by New York University. Before Covid-19 spread unceasingly through the city, this Buenos Aires doctor had left the emergencies to focus on the early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. Until on March 14, faced with what was looming as a true drama, he left the offices to return to the plain.
“We went from between 8 and 12 intensive care beds to 70. When we received our first patient we already had a battle plan ready, with a therapy dedicated exclusively to coronavirus. But what happened ended up exceeding us. If the emergency had capacity for 50 Suddenly we had 150 people there. Every day we opened a new unit and we had to call doctors from other hospitals, “says Mercado.
Mistakes
Mercado lives with his wife, who is also an Argentinean and an epidemiologist, and their two teenage children in Westchester County, which is a 30-minute train ride north from Grand Central Terminal. A few meters from his house, the first case in the city was reported, which is believed to have started the outbreak. “This person did not come from abroad. The virus was already there, but nobody knew it. The problem is that the hospital he went to first did not recognize him or did not want to send the coronavirus test, because at that time they were only done in Atlanta and if you had traveled abroad in the last two weeks. But he had only traveled to Florida. He spent five days in the community hospital, without isolation, with family visits and contagious, “he says.
This carelessness with patient zero was just one link in a long chain of mistakes that may explain why the United States and New York are going through this situation. President Donald Trump’s reluctance to establish a mandatory quarantine on the grounds that each state was the one who should decide what measures to take today it seems essential when it comes to explaining the spread of the virus. But that same decentralization also occurs in health. And for those who must face the pandemic it is a big problem. “There was no uniform response to the coronavirus here. As there is no type of protocol or guide to follow, each hospital does what it thinks is best. That generated a lot of confusion. Medicine needs more order and organization,” says Mercado.
In that sea of criticism, the hospital ship also sinks, the one that today has stolen prominence from the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State. “It is not helping us much. It can receive patients who need up to four liters of oxygen. But those are not the problem. What is overwhelmed is the care of critical patients,” he adds.
Family routines
Even when the health personnel were offered to stay in hotels as a precaution, Jorge and Cecilia decided to stay with Sofía and Tomás, their children. While young people attend virtual school classes, father and mother work in direct contact with the infected, and therefore take extreme precautions. For example, they use the pallier as a “decontamination” area: as soon as they arrive from the street they take off all their clothes and put them immediately to wash. And with an empty New York they no longer use public transport: from the hour and a half it took Jorge to get to Brooklyn by combining train and subway on a normal day, now it only takes him 35 minutes by car.
Nobody knows in New York, nor in the rest of the world, when this ordeal will end, or what it will be like that day after. “I ask myself a lot of questions. Who is going to be the one to say that this is all over and how is it going to be determined? And then what is going to happen when people start to go out on the streets again: will new new cases fall and Will we have to tell everyone to go back into their houses? “
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