'Scared, tired' New York doctor: 'It's only going to get tougher'

Attending physician at Mount Sinai Queens hospital, Dr. Matthew Bai, had to make the very difficult decision over the weekend to send his wife and 17-month-old daughter away while he remains on the front line of the U.S. novel coronavirus crisis.

"It's been tough," Bai said, in a video recording he made in his car Monday (March 30) morning before his shift started. "I don't know how long it's gonna be. But this morning when I left the house, I said goodbye to my wife and my daughter for who knows how long, it's going to be several weeks probably, before I see them in person again."

Bai said that there were over 60 patients with COVID-19 waiting for a hospital bed in his emergency department.

When he arrived at Mount Sinai Queens, in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, he demonstrated how to put on his personal protective equipment, then showed what the crowded emergency department looked like.

"Usually these halls are very neat and empty," he said. "And we're trying our best to treat everyone that we can. All these patients here, even though we're overflowing, we're trying our best to still provide them care, which we're doing."

As Bai came off his normally 12-hour shift that turned into a 14-hour shift, he said: "The things that I see in the ER are scary. I'm a little scared myself. It's not going to be easy. I mean, it's gonna be really tough and it's only going to get tougher over the next two weeks. But we'll get through this as best as we can and we'll try to use the resources that we have as best as we can to help as many people as we can."

On Friday (April 3), New York suffered its deadliest single day from the novel coronavirus, with 562 additional deaths in the last 24 hours for a total of 2,935 fatalities, by far the most of any U.S. state, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo.

 

 

 

REUTERS