‘Take me back!’ NYC patients ‘crying & screaming’ not to be sent to overcrowded hospitals during Covid-19 — doctor (VIDEO)

Patients in New York, gripped by a massive outbreak of the Covid-19, are resisting hospitalization out of fear of catching the deadly disease as medical facilities are severely overcrowded with coronavirus cases, a doctor said.

New York has become one of the epicenters of the coronavirus epidemic in the US. The state has seen more than 130,000 confirmed cases as well as 4,758 deaths — already more than in all of China, where the disease was first reported. The dire situation has put a severe strain on the local health system and, for patients, the prospect of being admitted to a hospital is more like a nightmare than salvation, according to Calvin Sun, a per-diem emergency physician and clinical professor of emergency medicine.

“I have patients coming, crying and screaming that they do not want to be sent to emergency rooms from the nursing homes because they have a fever,” he told Ruptly video news agency. “They are screaming because they do not want to get the virus. They are saying: “Take me back, take me back.”

Price of panic

Sun admits that patients have good reason to be seriously concerned about their health during hospitalization, given overcrowding and the risk of infection across shared wards and busy hallways. He suggested it might be much safer for the elderly to stay in their nursing homes than be sent to hospital.

The doctor partly blames the dire situation New York has found itself in on the panic that spread among the local population when the outbreak was only in its early stages, and that the Covid-19 ‘curve’ might well have been flattened through proper social distancing. Initially, people, who “looked good” and “had no symptoms” flocked to emergency rooms in droves seeking coronavirus testing — even though hospitals didn’t even have the tests yet, Sun explained.

They kept coming in the following weeks, with some displaying mild symptoms of the disease — despite the fact that they could have stayed home and received treatment there — likely spreading the disease to far more people.

‘Being sent to certain doom’

Now, the situation in the overcrowded hospitals looks really grim as medics try desperately to save the lives of those already admitted there, while dealing with an increasing influx of new arrivals.

“People upstairs were dying on a regular basis every hour. People were dying in emergency rooms waiting for their beds. Every day is just worse than the last,” Sun recalls of hospital conditions. The situation is particularly dangerous for the elderly, a known high-risk group for Covid-19, and older people are terrified of going to hospital. 

They know they are being sent to certain doom because they are going to inhale the air in the emergency rooms where the patients — 99 percent of whom are testing positive for Covid-19 — are coughing and sneezing.

The medic also acknowledged that hospitals still do not have reliable tactics to combat the deadly disease, not to mention ongoing uncertainties around how Covid-19 kills people so quickly.

“There is still no vaccine and no cure,” Sun said. “The hypothetical treatments that might work are based on poorly-run studies with very few patients, so I would not bet my life on it — or risk my life for.”

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!