IT WAS THE LAST WEEK of the longest March in recorded history, and Mount Sinai Brooklyn was teetering on the brink of collapse. In the emergency department of the 212-bed community hospital in Midwood, more than 90 patients were crammed into a space that usually holds 30 or 40. Almost every one of them was short of breath. Emergency-room nursing director Bobby Lynch played a complex game of Tetris to extricate a patient from behind a five-deep row of stretchers, maneuvering him to one of the three dialysis-equipped bays, while department medical director Deborah Dean rushed to bring a portable oxygen tank to a patient whose skin was turning blue. The alarms indicating patients who required immediate resuscitation rang out in a deafening trill. Corpses lay under white sheets head to toe with the critically ill. Roughly a fifth of the hospital’s staff was sick with COVID-19, including the hospital’s president, Scott Lorin, who was coordinating reinforcements from a stretcher in Mount Sinai’s main branch on the Upper East Side. And according to the governor’s office, it was going to get worse. “We just looked at each other, and one of my co-directors said, ‘If this isn’t the peak, I’m afraid of what the peak will look like,’ ” Lynch recalls.
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