Mark P. July 2020
DSC05115 1.jpg
I'm an emergency medicine physician and the medical director of an emergency room. Basically all we saw for weeks where patients with COVID because everybody else was afraid to come to the hospital.
In a way it was sort of helpful because it took a lot of the burden from the emergency department. One of the big things you want to do is obviously isolate patients that are at high risk of having COVID from the rest of the emergency room population. And the fact that no one was coming in with non COVID like complaints made that a little bit easier, but it was unfortunate because tons of people died at home.
For your typical heart attack or stroke you have a very narrow window of time to intervene before real damage is done.
People were so afraid of catching COVID in the emergency department, even though the reality was there were so, so many strict precautions being taken, at least in our emergency, that the chance of catching Covid from the emergency room was like zilch, but that wasn't the perception obviously.
So many people were afraid of a disease that probably wouldn't have even killed them that they waited at home too long and then when they did show up, the damage was done.
