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“Nobody Lived” ; UCSF Doctors Describe Life Inside Covid-19 “Warzones”, Plea for Citizens to Take Holiday Precautions
Only everyday citizens have the power to keep their loved ones safe, doctors write
In an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle published on December 2, 2020, University of California San Francisco (UCSF) doctors Lingsheng Li and Elizabeth Dzeng share excerpts from a study to understand the experiences of volunteer clinicians who were deployed to New York City during the initial COVID-19 surge in the spring of 2020.
Their quotes from doctors and nurses — often shared anonymous — are powerful and devastating. “Nobody lived” during the early days of the Covid-19 surge in New York City, one nurse told the doctors. There was a “code blue” every 15 minutes, and each time the code was called “it was basically a patient dying.”
Other physicians described the trauma of watching other peoples’ loved ones die alone from the disease, while breathing through N95 masks soaked with tears. “I blamed myself so intensely” one doctor told Li and Dzeng, echoing a common refrain that doctors and nurses feel responsibility, sadness and traumas around the Covid-19 deaths of their patients. It’s a burden that healthcare workers are now carrying into a second…
