New York City doctors warned the coronavirus outbreak is already worse than both the AIDS epidemic and 9/11.
“People come in, they get intubated, they die — the cycle repeats,” Dr. Steve Kasspidis told Sky News about the routine with coronavirus patients. “The system’s overwhelmed — all over the place.”
“9/11 was nothing compared to this,” he added. “We were open waiting for patients to come who never came, OK? Now, they just keep coming.”
A chief medical officer at one of New York City’s hospitals told the staff that the coronavirus pandemic was the “humanitarian mission of their lifetimes.”
“It’s human nature to be scared with something this evil going around,” a 55-year-old lab tech at a Manhattan hospital said. “I started my career during the AIDS epidemic, and this is much worse. It’s the same feeling we had after 9/11, that same silence in the streets. It’s like the city that suffered from insomnia finally fell asleep.”
“The virus is living everywhere. Someone spits on the sidewalk, it stays there. It gets on your shoe, it stays there — 24 hours, sometimes 72 hours. We are all going to get it, just in different ways. There’s no escaping this, not in New York,” she added.
There have been over 20,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in New York City and nearly 300 confirmed deaths, according to Johns Hopkins. The city is the epicenter of the worst outbreak of the virus in the United States, surpassing Washington state, which has half as many deaths as New York City and almost one-tenth of the number of cases.
