Anyway, some of you know Dr. Jarid Gray and/or nurse Justin Robbins from our hospital. The two of them volunteered to work in New York City. There full account is in Iron County Today's May 13 issue (you can download the whole thing, their story begins on page 3).
It's pretty harrowing.
... Gray went to ... a 585-bed hospital ... At their peak they had 750 patients, and over 90 percent of them were COVID-positive. When I arrived, the number of patients was down to 650, with 170 patients on ventilators, and still over 90 percent of them were COVID-positive.
...
I [Robbins] was assigned ... about double my patient load at Cedar City Hospital. ... When I was there at Southwell, for two weeks I only discharged two patients. The COVID patients on Med/ Surg were there a long time, I personally worked with the same group the entire time
...
The demographic of patients had much less pulmonary disease than one would think. “Not a lot of asthma, not a lot of people with COPD,” says Dr. Gray. “Hypertension was the most common thing among the patients, second most common was diabetes or coronary artery disease. I was struck by the fact they were a little younger than I would expect to see. The average age of the patients was 61. The patient’s comorbidities (having two or more chronic diseases or conditions in one patient at the same time) were not as extensive as you would think. Maybe it’s because all of those patients had passed away by the time we got there and we were just seeing the survivors.”
...
“The physician that oriented me at Long Island Jewish was pretty defeated,” says Dr. Gray. “He would say ‘Nothing is helping, nothing is working, patients are just dying and we can’t do anything about it.’” He was scared.
...
“Northwell is a progressive, forward thinking company,” says Dr. Gray. “They’d contracted with 500 traveling nurses in anticipation, started ordering additional PPE, and did everything they could to try and stay ahead of the game. But I think it was Mike Tyson who said ‘Everyone has a plan… till you get punched in the mouth.’ And they got punched in the mouth pretty hard. Northwell didn’t realize that, essentially, their entire hospitals were going to be COVID patients. They thought they could manage it with the bed population they had. For example, they normally have 35 ICU beds. When COVID hit they had to expand to 200. It took over full units of medical beds, with them having to put multiple patients in the same room. They thought they’d be able to manage it with the providers they had. But they ended up repurposing everyone in their system and put them in the hospital
...
Dr. Gray says having been a physician for over 20 years, he has never seen a hospital be taken down with one single condition like this. “Please don’t compare COVID-19 to flu,” says Dr. Gray. “It is a lazy comparison.
...
“I have responded to more rapid response calls (patient in distress) in the two weeks I was at Long Island Jewish than I have over the course of my entire career. I have heard more code blue calls in one day than I have heard at our hospital over the course of a year
They also did a Zoom meeting after they got back. Supposedly COSE was going to post that somewhere for the community, but I haven't seen it yet.
UPDATE: Here is the direct link to the video on YouTube. BTW: Dr. Gray is an SUU alum as well. It can also be found on the Alumni Relations site at https://www.suu.edu/alumni/forever/ .
P.S. One thing that I got out of the video that I haven't seen elsewhere is that Dr. Gray reported that the hospital system he was at had 300-350 patients who had survived COVID-19, but due to lung damage would have to be on ventilators for life. The prognosis for that is horrific. Before polio was brought under control through vaccination in the late 1950's, people who survived it often had to live inside an "iron lung". In short, those 300-350 people are looking at lifetime institutionalization in a skilled nursing facility.
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