The Growing Chaos Inside New York’s Hospitals

Matthew Morrison is a thirty-six-year-old E.R. doctor at BronxCare, a hospital in the South Bronx, which has a large Dominican population. He speaks “medical Spanish,” he told me. “Fiebre. Dolor. Náusea. Vómito.” On Wednesday, he treated a woman in her mid-sixties with telltale signs of covid-19: fever, shortness of breath, coughing up blood. She was terrified. She told Morrison, with tears in her eyes, “Doctor, no me siento bien.” Before admitting her, Morrison gave her the same speech he’d been giving all his patients: “You’ve come to the right place. We’re here for you. Unfortunately, we don’t have a specific treatment for covid, but we’re able to offer all sorts of supportive care.” People were anxious. Another likely covid-19 patient, an older African-American man, had taken a cocktail of medication—Percocet, Benadryl, an antibiotic—to treat his aches and fever, before arriving, disoriented, at the E.R.

New York City has become an epicenter of the crisis, with more than ninety-six hundred confirmed cases as of Sunday, and hospitals are struggling to keep pace. BronxCare workers were in the process of setting up a separate triage tent, to manage covid-19 patients. Until then, the E.R.’s waiting room would be crowded with the “worried well,” or, in this case, the worried sick—people with coughs and flulike symptoms that might or might not be signs of covid-19, who’d come because they wanted to get tested. Most were sent back home, with orders to self-quarantine. Tests were being reserved for people sick enough to be hospitalized.

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