NYC paramedic says coronavirus patients brought to hospitals ‘to die’

City paramedic Megan Pfeiffer is on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic in New York — and said the situation has surpassed anything she could have imagined.
“It’s like battlefield triage right now,” she told The Post of the increasingly grim outlook.
“We’re pretty much bringing patients to the hospital to die.
“We know what we signed up for — though we didn’t expect this. It’s very straining. We’re all exhausted.’’
Pfeiffer, 31, treats patients in Queens in response to 911 calls.
Nearly one-quarter of the city’s paramedics are now out because of illness or injury amid the deadly pandemic, officials said on Tuesday — while the number of 911 calls coming in only soars higher.
Pfeiffer, an FDNY paramedic since 2013, is assigned to Jamaica Station 50 and says COVID-19 now involves the largest number of 911 calls she handles.
“There are a lot of really sick people. Others are panicked, and as soon as they have symptoms, they call us. Some have fever, some have shortness of breath,” Pfeiffer said.
“The hospitals in Queens I go to are totally full.”
Pfeiffer recalled recently bringing a patient who was in cardiac arrest to NewYork-Presbyterian Queens hospital in Flushing, and the person was immediately admitted and put on the last ventilator available in the Intensive Care Unit.
While older people infected with COVID-19 tend to be seriously ill, she said she was struck by how many younger adults she treats who are also ending up in a hospital ward with the illness.
“There are 20- to 40-year-olds being sent to the ICU,” she said.
Her colleagues describe similar horror stories.
EMT Phil Suarez said the Big Apple’s fight against the coronavirus is like being in a “war zone” — and he should know.
“I’ve actually been in a war zone. It is a pretty good analogy,” said the paramedic, also a humanitarian-aid worker who has provided trauma care in ­Mosul, in northern Iraq.
Suarez told Reuters the Big Apple’s raging battle against the virus “just wears you down.”
“You know, I ­really . . . I’ve welled up in tears at times, you know, when we take somebody, a loved one, out of their home,” he said.
He noted that because the virus is so highly contagious, family members aren’t allowed to accompany patients in the ambulance or visit them in the hospital.
“You can’t go to the waiting room and wait,” he said. “So we literally just take their loved ones, and oftentimes, we know that they will never see them again alive.
“And these people will most likely die in a bed alone. It’s ­profound sadness.”

Last week, Suarez said, he got home from a 16-hour shift where nearly all of his ambulance runs involved coronavirus patients.
He noted that an “all-time record” involving city EMTs was recently reached — when there were more than 7,100 reported emergencies in the Big Apple in a 24-hour period.
“That’s almost double what we normally do, which is profound for New York City — 7,100 emergencies in a 24-hour period. It’s overwhelming,” he said.
According to Suarez, the only other time the emergency calls reached that level in a 24-hour period was right after the 9/11 terror attacks.
What’s different this time, he said, is that he and his colleagues are afraid they’ll be exposed to the ­virus on the job.
“We’re just in fear that we’re going to come down with it and we’re going to be that 2 percent” who dies, he said.
Pfeiffer said paramedics are self-quarantining to avoid infecting family and friends. She said she often sleeps at her work station in Jamaica. “A lot of people are not going home,” she said.
City paramedics and emergency technicians who work the ambulance crews are employed by the Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Services division.
About 23 percent of all EMS members — about 950 — were out on medical leave as of Sunday, the most recent data available, according to an FDNY spokesman.
Some of those are “people injured on the job from normal operations” not connected to the pandemic, the representative noted.

At the same time, the FDNY has seen an increase of about 2,500 emergency calls per day, spiking at 6,527 calls on Sunday.
A total of 282 FDNY members — EMS, firefighters and civilian workers — have tested positive for COVID-19.
Oren Barzilay, head of paramedics union Local 2507, which represents EMS workers, said the coronavirus outbreak has taken a toll on his members.
“It’s really heart-wrenching work. It’s going into a house and not knowing what to expect,” Barzilay said. “We’re taking sick people to the hospitals not knowing if they’re going to come out alive or not.”
He said there are EMS units where nearly all of the workers are sick.
“We have people who are sleeping in their cars to protect their families. This is a communicable disease,” Barzilay said.
More than 75,700 New Yorkers statewide have tested positive for the coronavirus, and more than 1,500 have died — with New York City being the epicenter of the outbreak.
New York City tallied more than 41,700 confirmed coronavirus cases, with about 1,100 fatalities, according to statistics released Tuesday evening.
https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/were-bringing-covid-19-patients-to-hospitals-to-die-nyc-paramedic/