By John Seabrook, The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.
The call came in to the emergency department at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital, a twenty-five-bed facility in Lebanon, New Hampshire, around 2 p.m. on a weekday in mid-March. Patient X had arrived by car, and, by the time he reached the hospital, the pain in his legs was so severe that he couldn’t move.
Jesse Webber, a paramedic, donned full personal protective equipment (P.P.E.) before going outside with a wheelchair. Since the onset of the pandemic, almost all sick people who entered the hospital’s E.R. were considered, whatever their symptoms, to be P.U.I.s—persons under investigation for covid-19.
The patient, a heavyset man in middle age, was lucid when Webber wheeled him into the emergency department’s negative-pressure room—a seven-by-eleven-foot windowless space fitted with a noisy exhaust fan that removes contaminated air. Once the man was inside, his mental state deteriorated rapidly. A team made up of Nancy Ferguson, a doctor, and two critical-care nurses, Kacie Boyle and Laura Williams, in full P.P.E., joined Webber and Patient X in the cramped room.
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