Nowhere is the race against the coronavirus as intense as in hospital ICUs in New York, where overworked doctors and nurses fight to keep COVID-19 victims alive. Scott Pelley reports on ICU doctors gallantly battling the pandemic with diminishing resources as their hospitals approach capacity. He also speaks to Lieutenant General Todd Semonite, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who vows to build a makeshift facility with 2,900 beds in New York City’s Javits Convention Center in time to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The story will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, March 29 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
Pelley spoke to Dr. Mangala Narasimhan at Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Medical Center. “I have 18 beds in one ICU full of people on ventilators, completely sedated, unable to open their eyes or interact or talk to their families,” says Narasimhan, the hospital’s chief of critical care. “And we are feeding them through tubes, and we are completely keeping them paralyzed so that we can properly ventilate them. It’s our sickest patients, and they’re in every single room of our ICU.”
The New York metropolitan area is the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo asked the president for help from the Army Corps of Engineers. Semonite was tasked with converting a convention center into a hospital and fast. “We don’t have enough time to do this the normal way… this is a catastrophe,” says Semonite. “We can’t have a complicated solution. So what we need is a very, very simplistic concept, what I call the good enough design. So, I’m telling my guys, ‘You don’t have the time to do it exactly the way everybody wants it. You’ve got to get it done by what the mayor or when that governor says.'”
On Sunday, the Javits Convention Center will be partially ready to accept non-COVID-19 patients so hospitals can focus on coronavirus cases. The Corps is also building facilities in empty hotels and buildings. The Navy hospital ship, Comfort, is expected in New York as well.
Semonite will be going to other states as needed. “We are concerned about New Jersey, we’re very concerned about California… Washington,” Semonite says. “Yesterday, I had one of my two-star generals in Illinois, worried about the Chicago area… I spoke to Governor Edwards the other day in Louisiana, those are the big six but that doesn’t mean the other 44 [states] aren’t going to get the same level of treatment.”
Doctors like Dr. Gul Zaidi at Northwell Health, New York State’s largest hospital system are coping, despite overwork. “There’s no time to sit, let alone eat or do simple things like take bathroom breaks. We just keep going. And it’s essentially one room to the next,” says the critical care specialist. Gul says she hasn’t slept well since before the outbreak exploded.
Two of Narasimhan’s colleagues tested positive for COVID-19. A New York City nurse died of the virus. Officials are bracing for what could be a shortage of personnel to care for patients.
Hospitals are turning to recently retired healthcare workers and medical students about to graduate to fill in and help handle the patients expected. But, Mike Dowling, CEO of Northwell Health, says, “You don’t quit. You don’t retreat. You don’t put up the white flag. You are going to win.”
© 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
