A few days from now, I will come across the name of Guido Bertolini, a clinical epidemiologist who studies intensive care. Through a colleague of his, I reach out to him over WhatsApp, and we begin corresponding. He had been high up in the Italian Alps through the last day of February, when the distressing messages started to come in from colleagues asking him to join a new Coronavirus Crisis Unit for Lombardy, a region in northern Italy. Some of the pleas had an Excel file attached. When Bertolini opened it, he tells me, he couldn’t believe the numbers. He had to see the situation for himself. With an E.R. doctor from Milan, he drove to the Lombardy city of Lodi the next day. He was horrified by what he witnessed. “So many patients, in every corner,” he says. “They were attached to oxygen in all possible ways.” Individual oxygen dispensers, meant for single patients, were being split among four people at a time. “When we came out, we were silent for all the journey home,” he says. “We could not speak.” He knows the hospital has already passed its maximum capacity.
I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same. - The New York Times: I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same.
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