“The frustrating thing about all of this

is it really just feels like it’s too little, too late.

Like we knew — we knew it was coming.

Today is kind of getting worse and worse.

We had to get a refrigerated truck

to store the bodies of patients who are dying.

We are, right now, scrambling to try

to get a few additional ventilators or even

CPAP machines.

If we could get CPAP machines,

we could free up ventilators for patients who need them.

You know, we now have these five vents.

We probably — unless people die, I suspect we’ll

be back to needing to beg for ventilators again

in another day or two.

There’s a mythical 100 vents out there

which we haven’t seen.

Leaders in various offices, from the president

to the head of Health and Hospitals,

saying things like, ‘We’re going to be fine.

Everything’s fine.’

And from our perspective, everything is not fine.

I don’t have the support that I need,

and even just the materials that I need, physically,

to take care of my patients.

And it’s America, and we’re supposed

to be a first-world country.

On a regular day, my emergency department’s volume

is pretty high.

It’s about 200 people a day.

Now we’re seeing 400 or more people a day.

At first, we were trying to isolate patients

with cough and fever and be more careful around them,

but we weren’t necessarily being

extra careful around all the other patients.

And then we started to realize that patients

who were coming in with no fever but abdominal pain

actually had findings on their X-rays and chest CTs

that were consistent with this coronavirus,

Covid-19.

So someone in a car accident gets brought in

and we get a CT scan of them, and their lungs

look like they have coronavirus.

We were seeing a lot of patients who probably had

Covid, but we didn’t realize.

Ten residents and also many, many of our nurses

and a few of the attending physicians got sick.

The anxiety of this situation is really overwhelming.

All of the doctors, it’s hard for us

to get tested even if we want to, even if we have symptoms.

We’re exposed over and over again.

We don’t have the protective equipment

that we should have.

I put on one N95 mask in the morning.

I need to have that N95 mask on for every patient I see.

I don’t take it off all day.

The N95 mask I wore today is also the N95 mask

I wore on Friday.

We’re always worried that we’ll be out of N95 masks.

What’s a little bit scary now is the patients

that we’re getting are much sicker.

Many of the young people who are getting sick

don’t smoke, they’re healthy, they have no co-morbidities.

They’re just young, regular people

between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect

to get this sick.

So many people are saying it’s going to be OK,

everything’s fine, we have what we need.

And if this goes on for a month or two or three or five

like it did in China, and we’re already this strained,

we don’t have what we need.

I don’t really care if I get in trouble

for speaking to the media.

I want people to know that this is bad.

People are dying.

We don’t have the tools that we need

in the emergency department and in the hospital

to take care of them, and —

and it’s really hard.”