On the front lines in the battle against a virus that seems to have come out of nowhere and paralyzed the world
“It feels like a war zone. I’ve been a nurse for quite a few years, and thought I’d seen it all — but coronavirus is something I never imagined,” says one Orthodox Jewish nurse who works in a New York hospital reeling under the onslaught of the COVID-19 wave breaking over the city.
The military metaphor is apt: Coronavirus is like a giant war machine carving up cities across the world, with New York’s Jewish community particularly hard-hit.
So fast-moving is the outbreak that statistics quickly become meaningless. As of press time, there have been close to 1,200 deaths in New York State (and around 60,000 confirmed cases), around 800 of them in New York City, and health authorities are braced for the expected peak of hospitalizations, likely to come in mid-April, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo.
The twelve-hour nursing shifts are a series of crises, as exhausted staff struggle to connect patients to the ventilators — a risky process because it exposes them to the aggressive virus — while physically constricted by bulky protective gear, known as PPE. “We finish one intubation and then go onto the next,” she says.
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