New York Four Weeks In – Two Hours Daily to Sanitize, Two Hours to Cry

At the hospital at the epicenter of the city at the epicenter of the global pandemic, an emergency-room doctor struggles to keep it together—and find supplies.

- By Lisa Miller

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, Emily Wolfe slipped away from her patients and into the break room. She was aching to get out of her mask. The virus was probably everywhere in the break room, all over everything—on the locker Wolfe shared with two other doctors and the large conference table where the staff still shared meals. And she knew that every time she removed her PPE, she increased her exposure, no matter how carefully she washed and disrobed. “I have my helmet and other stuff, and I’m taking that off, but there’s nowhere to put it down. The whole room was not safe. If this were Ebola, we would all be dead in five seconds.” But the tight, heavy mask was compressing her nose and turning her cheeks purple. She needed air.

Wolfe is an attending physician in the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, where she’s worked for over 20 years, her whole professional life, but this night—March 29, as the number of cases in the city was turning sharply upward—was “unbelievable,” she said. “Absolutely unbelievable. It felt so out of control I could not physically help people fast enough.” Everyone had a fever. Everyone was out of breath, some unable to walk even ten steps without passing out; by the time she stabilized one person, two more were waiting. “A guy would walk in satting 37 percent”—an extremely low level of blood-oxygen saturation—“and you’d think, He’s terrible. He’s breathing so hard. I want to get ready to intubate him right away, and then someone else comes in and he looks even worse, so I give the first guy a little ketamine, maybe that will buy him a little time, and intubate the second guy.”