Yeah, it’s all true. Ambulances backed up without enough room to offload people. ERs overflowing with folks on gurneys lining hallways for days. Multiple people on ventilators in the ER when they need to be in an ICU bed.
The city morgue is full. Refrigerated shipping containers are set up behind the medical Examiners building in the same space they used on 9/11. Now hospitals have them too as it’s too full to move them to the Medical Examiners They have had to build triple stacks like bunks to increase capacity per container to around 110. And it’s not just hospitals where deaths are occurring. On average, there are 25 cardiac arrests that don't make it per day in the city. For the last 4 weeks it’s been 200. The assumption is a good number of those are COVID related deaths, but they don’t test people after they die.
The crematoria in the city are around 2 and a 1/2 weeks behind running full out. In normal circumstances the medical examiner will hold onto a deceased person for 30 to 60 days trying to find family to claim the body. After that, there’s a potter’s field on an island off of the Bronx called Hart’s Island. They normally have burials once a week. Now it’s up to five days a week in double wide trenches that are then covered over. Those are bodies not claimed by family within 15 days. They may well have families but there aren’t resources to keep them past that time.
In the hospitals there is still a major shortage of protective gear. Doctors, nurses, and other staff are becoming ill, some critically on ventilators themselves, and some of those are dying. There have been enough ventilators with some juggling of equipment, but almost all are in use.
Testing remains a problem. If you’re not sick enough to be admitted to the hospital you may not be able to be tested at all, even with the classic symptoms present. They don’t get counted into the case numbers yet, although nursing home cases are now being counted. Estimates are now that every nursing home in NYC have several if not more cases.
Deaths are occurring in the elderly, but there are a good 20% of deaths among under 40 years old. My daughter had a friend she graduated with this past February, around the same age of 25, no known health problems who died. One of her best friend’s father was intubated today. It’s doubtful he will survive the next two days. Her friend, his son, cannot visit as there are not allowing visitors in at all.
I live near 3 hospitals that are caring for many cases as designated to be primary viral illness centers. There was an average of one ambulance siren every 30 minutes or so day and night. They run with lights and sirens just to speed things up for a faster turnaround to go back to work. In the last week it has lightened up to maybe every 30-45 minutes which is an improvement. I live in an independent assisted living facility. About 20 out of 200 are in the hospital with COVID. A friend of mine here died about 10 days ago in the hospital. The owner of a minimart a block away I used to go for small stuff died 3 weeks ago. It’s still closed.
So yes, things in NYC are really that bad. The rest of the country is certainly less than what’s happening here, but there are major cities where it seems to just beginning to pick up. There are also states that are not heavily infected that hopefully will be spared. It’s the extremely high density of NYC that’s been the perfect place for such a major outbreak. Hopefully by May 15th the shelter in place orders will begin to roll back, but I expect it will depend on how things look the beginning of May. There is now an order no one can go out without a mask of some sort, mostly homemade because good luck finding proper masks, if you’ll be somewhere you can’t maintain distance from others, and a requirement on mass transit, taxis and Uber.
There is a fairly large pharmacy chain, Walgreens, by me. They only allow 5 people in the store at one time. You line up outside with markers six feet apart to stand on. The other day it took me 30 minutes to get in. The time before took me an hour. And of course I just had to forget one or two things I wanted to
buy. I’ll wait a while before I make another trip.
I’m sorry to paint such a terrible picture of life here, but in time I expect we’ll start to recover. But yeah, the news media isn’t making it up or sensationalizing the situation. It’s legit, and it’s just one day after another.
