Here is a summary of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital's update from yesterday:
New York city is the epicenter.
-Yesterday the national guard arrived in Westchester at Lawrence and Hudson Valley to help us address some of the issues on site
-1229 cases today (20-22% ICU patients and virtually all of those are on ventilators)
-Split ventilators is a VERY complex procedure, not every patients and piece of equipment is suitable for this
-Both of our medical school partners took the opportunity to allow their 4th year medical students to graduate early. They are being given the option of doing some work here at the hospital. Of course, they are new doctors, and we are taking precautions to assign them duties that are appropriate.
-Gov. asked us to increase our ICU beds by 50%.
-I would not recommend wearing gloves when you’re out and about because it could give you a false sense of security. The best way to keep yourself protected is to wash your hands. Wash in, wash out.
Clinical work:
-Clinical trial for recovered patients to donate plasma back to patients who are sick.
-N95Mask is for aerosolizing procedures. Our supply is very tight. But we are making them available to anyone that has direct patient care.
-Our 3d printed face shields are now available to protect that N95 mask for reuse.
-Sterilizing N95 masks, work in progress.
-Make sure you do a fit check with your N95 mask
Testing:
-We continue to be challenged with the supply of swabs. So while our teams are working on alternative solutions we are moving towards stopping for other respiratory illnesses in the meantime (flu/RSV) because it uses up the swab kits that we need for COVID. Mostly because right now there aren’t many of these other viruses and this way we can do more COVID testing.
