With the acceleration of hospitalizations and an establishment almost at capacity, Dr Shamit Patel is preparing for the worst in the coming days, while hoping not to have to choose between the patients of the coronavirus.
Just ten days ago, only half of the patients the 46-year-old intern saw at Beth Israel, one of the Mount Sinai group hospitals in Manhattan, had COVID-19.
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Last week, the proportion increased to three quarters, and is now around 85 to 90%.
“We stopped seeing ordinary patients,” he said in a videoconference interview. “So the hospital is full of coronavirus patients.”
“We have more patients than our usual capacity,” he announces. “But we had already increased the number of beds in anticipation”.
The wave experienced by the establishment in which he works corresponds to that undergone in New York City, where we went from 463 cases diagnosed two weeks ago to more than 36,000 on Monday.
“At the rate that I am observing”, explains the doctor, “the peak could arrive at the end of the week or next week.
Under pressure for two weeks already, Shamit Patel is now preparing for the worst, even if “it is something that we hope not to see”.
Worst of all, it is a situation comparable to that of certain regions of Italy, where the health system finds itself unable to take care of all its patients.
“We will have to be a little faster to examine each patient and define the treatment,” he predicts. “We could be led to see double or triple the number we usually see.”
But, he worries, “you can’t really go beyond triple and treat effectively.”
Aside from the limitations of caregivers, Shamit Patel is equally concerned about possible inadequate equipment, especially life support, which State Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio talk about every day. .
“If there is an influx and you only have a limited number of ventilators, you can’t ventilate everyone,” the doctor describes. “And from there you have to choose”.
“There is a lot of uncertainty and anxiety, but there is not much I can do about it,” says Peter Liang, a gastroenterologist who has been redeployed to treat Covid-19 patients.
“So I try to focus on what I control,” he says. “Take care of my patients, support my colleagues and take care of myself so that I can see my family every night”.
“It’s hard to know that every morning, this may be the last time I see my wife and my two-month-old baby before several days,” explains the doctor from the Manhattan Veterans Hospital, who knows he is at “high risk” of contracting the disease.
Shamit Patel, too, finds it hard to live together with his 80-year-old father, who has Parkinson’s disease, and his aunt, who has cancer.
“I don’t want to transmit (the virus) to them,” he confides. “Because I don’t think they would do well.”
He therefore respects the minimum regulatory distance of two meters and does not skimp on the wipes, while ensuring that his two eldest have sufficient food reserves.
“I stay in my room most of the time, and from time to time I check that they are okay.”
In hospital or at home, stress and anxiety are always present for these personnel engaged, as Governor Cuomo repeats, in a “marathon”.
Peter Liang was Monday on the eighth day of a streak of nine, twelve hours a day.
“If it goes up, but then it ebbs, we could hold out for some time,” anticipates Shamit Patel. “But deep down for months, it’s difficult to hold”.
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