CNN was invited to witness the scenes inside the University Hospital of Brooklyn, New York, part of the SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University. All the patients the hospital treats now are suffering from coronavirus -- it's one of three hospitals in the state
ordered by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to dedicate itself entirely to dealing with the pandemic.
The volume of people coming to the ER is lower than before the virus, but because they are all suffering from Covid-19, the patients are sicker and the death rate is high. Nearly 25% of the patients admitted to the hospital with the virus have died.
"It's not the hospital it's the nature of the disease," Dr. Lorenzo Paladino, an emergency medicine physician, told CNN. There are no broken bones or stomach viruses these days. These doctors are only seeing people who are struggling to breathe because they've contracted the virus that's caused a pandemic across the globe and is now heading to a peak in New York City, according to some scientists.
"It's relentless," Paladino said. And there is no time for rest. CNN reporters saw a health care worker wrap the body of a deceased patient. Within 30 minutes, the body was gone, the space was sanitized and there lay a critically ill man, coughing, with an oxygen mask on his face.
Of the nearly 400 people admitted for Covid-19 treatment at the hospital, 90% of them are over the age of 45, and 60% are older than 65, staff said. But it's not only an affliction for the old. Their youngest patient was a toddler, age 3.
"We have some young people in there in their 20s, not used to seeing this and some had a thousand-mile stare, just crying," Paladino said of patients seeking treatment for coronavirus in the emergency room. "They just watched four codes happen. This is 'Grey's Anatomy' stuff for them, not real life. It shouldn't happen in front of them."
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