By: Bob Tuchman
“The emergency room at in Elmhurst Hospital in Queens is so crowded…” is not the beginning of a snappy one-liner.
In fact, it’s not funny at all. Because according to published reported, the emergency room at in Elmhurst Hospital in Queens is so crowded that a violently coughing man gave up waiting for treatment and simply walked out of it.
“It’s very crowded inside,” the middle-aged Hispanic man told The New York Post, “in between coughs that sounded almost like a leaf blower. “I left before they got to me. It’s too crowded in there. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
The man, who was wearing a surgical mask, said he had the protective gear before he went to seek treatment at the overwhelmed hospital. But similar masks are being distributed in the waiting room — by prospective patients themselves, he said. “They gave people masks who didn’t have them,” he said.”
Sad stories appear to be proliferating at the beleaguered hospital, and include everything from dead tired EMTs, bunches of ambulances arriving at nearly the same time, and unconscious patients waiting on gurneys for attention.
The web site buzzfeednews.com interviewed a doctor at Elmhurst Hospital about what he was dealing with. Preferring to remain anonymous, he reportedly told the publication: “Elmhurst is just getting destroyed. It’s very, very gruesome. The hospital has a 15-bed intensive care unit that would normally cover respiratory patients or patients with any significant illness requiring intubation, like pneumonia, liver injury, encephalopathy, or kidney problems. What’s remarkable is that now, every patient is a COVID patient. And they’re all ARDS [acute respiratory distress syndrome, a life-threatening fluid buildup in the lungs].
“There is a nine-bed medical intensive care unit — those are all ARDS,” he continued. “Then you have a 30-bed stepdown unit. That’s all intubated COVID patients. Then there’s the general medicine floor. That’s all intubated COVID patients. You walk into the hospital and you think, Not only is the virus infecting people — it’s infecting the hospital itself. It’s pushing out everything else. It’s all COVID. That’s insane.”
“There’s a lot of fear,” Mayor de Blasio said during a televised interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I don’t blame any health care professional. Look what they’re having to deal with. The truth is we have again the supplies for this week and next. We have to make sure every hospital is getting them to their extraordinary, heroic medical personnel — the nurses and doctors, everyone in those hospitals because supplies are here.”
