FEMA sending 85 refrigerated trucks to New York City for COVID-19 bodies
Quote:
New York City is so short on morgue space for coronavirus victims that FEMA is hauling in trailers to store all the bodies.
“We are sending refrigeration trucks to New York to help with some of the problem on a temporary basis,” FEMA regional director Thomas Von Essen said at a Manhattan press briefing with Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday.
The city is expecting FEMA to send 85 trucks. Although their capacity was not immediately available, similar trailers already in use hold 40 bodies each. The additional FEMA trucks could double the city’s morgue capacity from 3,500 to 7,000.
Von Essen, who served as FDNY commissioner during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said the military has also sent 42 people to the Medical Examiner’s Office in Manhattan to help process the 790 fatalities.
Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the ME, said the military personnel are 42 Department of Defense Mortuary Affairs staffers who will assist with managing mobile morgues.
Von Essen said he’s also trying to build morgue capacity near Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, which is a hotspot for COVID-19 patients.
“We in New York City have a desperate need for help over in Queens. And we are working on that as we speak, there’s folks trying to put it all together. There’s only so many of these teams that military has,” Von Essen said.
“We have 50 states and a couple of territories and commonwealths that we are trying to, not hold back resources, but trying to make it, make a plan ready that works for the whole country. So, it’s difficult but everybody’s trying. And we will get more help here for New York,” he said.
Von Essen said there were no discussions of using large venues like Madison Square Garden to hold the dead.
“Fortunately, we are not thinking of anything like that,” he said.
Worthy-Davis said the city has purchased an additional 45 mobile morgues that can hold about 40 bodies each.
Health care workers were using forklifts to load bodies into a refrigerated truck at Brooklyn Hospital Center in Fort Greene on Sunday. Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital was the first to get refrigerated trailers to house bodies last week.
Worthy-Davis said the city now has capacity for between 3,500 and 3,600 bodies with the makeshift morgues. Before the pandemic, the city’s morgue capacity was just 900. She declined to say how many bodies were currently stored in the facilities.
Just five days ago, de Blasio said there was still room for COVID-19 victims in city morgues.
NYC paramedic says coronavirus patients brought to hospitals ‘to die’Quote:
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 out because of illness or injury amid the deadly pandemic, officials said 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.
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