The Forgotten Victims of COVID-19: Those With Other Treatable Conditions
“I’ve already seen a couple people die of completely treatable non-COVID things…but in the deluge, they were missed.”
A woman living in New York City was rushed to a local hospital with a stroke on Tuesday, March 24th. Upon arrival, the place completely filled with COVID-19 patients, she was turned away.
This kind of medical horror story is becoming the norm in New York City as well as in other densely populated American cities where coronavirus is currently rampant.
Similar to what we watched happen in China, U.S. hospitals are having to adapt quickly to the mounting surge of hospitalizations due to coronavirus. But these adaptation measures are not seamless by any stretch. The flood of patients coming in with COVID-19 is unlike anything most health professionals have seen before, and in attempt to acclimate, hospitals all over the country are having to convert other units of their hospitals into COVID-19 units.
I got a chance to speak with *Matthew, a resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, who now, due to the City’s dire coronavirus needs, is working in the critical care unit in Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens.
“One by one each floor in the hospital is getting converted into COVID units, he said. “They’re also converting the big lobbies into patient wards.”
A nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital voiced that her GI surgery ward is getting converted into a COVID unit this week.
But what about all the people sick with things other than coronavirus? Unfortunately, a pandemic doesn’t put the brakes on other illnesses or everyday injuries. People still hurt themselves, patients with chronic conditions are still battling them; and pregnancies, heart attacks, strokes, injuries, and cancer are all still in session. But terrifyingly, what we’re seeing now is a sudden and enormous minimization in access to regular healthcare all over the country due to the flood of emergent needs of thousands infected with coronavirus.
In a New York Times article from March 3rd 2020, journalists Amy Qin and Sui-Lee Wee reported about this very phenomenon that was then unfolding in China:
In Wuhan, many hospitals have been converted into facilities for treating only patients with the coronavirus. Elsewhere, other facilities have closed amid shortages of medical workers or rejected patients because of fears of cross-infection in the wards. Elective surgeries have been postponed indefinitely. Many cities have imposed travel restrictions and quarantine requirements that, for many critically ill patients, mean delays they cannot afford.
In another Times article from February 25th, 2020, Alexandra Stevenson wrote,
Maternity nurses and doctors have been pulled from their ordinary duties and shipped off to crisis centers and more than a thousand hospitals newly designated for coronavirus patients. Smaller community hospitals that offer obstetrics and gynecological services are temporarily closed because of staff shortages.
Dr. Xi Chen, an assistant professor of health policy and economics at the Yale School of Public Health, predicted early on that preventable deaths from strokes, heart attacks and other acute diseases could outnumber the lives saved from treating coronavirus patients.
Matthew, recounting his long days in the Elmhurst critical care unit, lamented,
“[With the surge], it’s not just the COVID victims I can’t help, though that’s bad enough — it’s the fact that we were [already] super busy taking care of very sick people who needed our help even before this happened. Now that we’re all buried by the demands of this disease, what happens to them?
“I’ve already seen a couple people die of completely treatable non-COVID things…but in the deluge, they were missed.”
Hospitals in this country are very busy places with staff that, on a good day, are already stretched thin. With the novel coronavirus exponentially increasing hospitalizations throughout our cities, this is becoming a crisis not only for coronavirus patients but also for other emergency patients and patients in need of ongoing monitoring and care to remain healthy, and in many cases, alive.
My cousin, normally a psychiatrist at New York Presbyterian Hospital, is now getting called in to fill the role of an ER doctor in her hospital. Of course, it’s not that her usual patients need her less, it’s simply a part of an essential, city-wide reprioritization process in response to the virus.
“I can’t get sick now” my 94-year-old New-York-City-dwelling grandmother said over the phone the other day. Just the idea of her needing anything from any medical professional whatsoever while living in her coronavirus-ravaged town is positively terrifying.
The purpose of flattening the curve is not only to ensure that our health system is able to treat everyone with this brand new disease, but also that all the people who need to go to the doctor or who have ER visits get seen and treated as well.
“I’ve already seen a couple people die of completely treatable non-COVID things…but in the deluge, they were missed.”
Governor Andrew Cuomo was treacherously slow in the incorporation of social and civic restrictions in response to the coronavirus spread, waiting until March 18th to close schools, when there were already 1,871 cases of coronavirus throughout the City of New York. Due to his delay in action combined with the rapid-moving, contagious nature of this virus, within a matter of days, the medical system in New York City became over-saturated with cases. As of today, the City still does not have a “shelter in place” order, even with over 47,000 confirmed cases in just the City alone.
As the coronavirus makes its way around the country, New York’s lethal error can be a lesson to other communities. New Yorkers are shouting from their apartments at the rest of us to stay home, to flatten the curve before our communities’ medical systems get completely saturated, not only for the good of those who come down with this virulent virus, but also for the life and wellbeing of those with common ailments and unavoidable emergencies who will inevitably also need treatment in the coming weeks and months.
*indicates name changed for privacy
