'I have never been in a war. It feels like a war.'
Photo: Reza Estakhrian/Getty Images From the moment he wakes up, Dr. Peter Shearer, the chief medical officer at Mount Sinai hospital in Brooklyn, spends his day thinking about coronavirus. As one of the hospital’s leaders, his job entails coordinating with the doctors, nurses, and technicians on the front lines of patient care, something that has gotten increasingly difficult as Mount Sinai tries to contain the spread among its own employees.
I don’t think medical science has an understanding yet of why some people do so much worse than others. There are theories out there about the viral load and probably some genetic variation. It’s unclear. Certainly underlying things like diabetes and high blood pressure add to the equation. Smoking, lung disease, vaping absolutely doesn’t help.
I would say 10 to 15 percent of the staff is out [sick with COVID]. Many of them have been tested, while some have just had symptoms and we know clinically that they’re positive. Some of the employees that are at higher risk for contracting the illness are our respiratory therapists. They’re putting people on ventilators and working around the part of the patient where they might get some aerosolized particles. They are uniquely skilled employees, and they’re dropping like flies.
We have very small morgues that can only hold five bodies at a time and they do tend to get picked up relatively quickly. There’s a truck parked outside my window now. It’s around 20 feet long, I assume it could hold 30 bodies minimum. It looks like a big trailer with a refrigerator unit on it. We haven’t had to use it yet. Inside it’s just a cold metal space. It’s not very respectful at the moment. I’m not going to hang curtains in it, but it needs to be a little bit more … something.
I think conversations [about triage] will come into play in the next week or so. We don’t have medical therapy for this, all we have is supportive care. There are patients for whom that’s not going to save their life, it may actually add to their suffering. There are some patients who it’s not even really an option to put them on a ventilator. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. My father died in mid-December before this all started, at the age of 85.
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