April 6, 2020 / EXCLUSIVE By Lauren del Valle and Miguel Marquez, CNN
Brooklyn, New York (CNN) – One emergency room. Forty minutes. Six patients go into cardiac arrest. Four die before they make it out of the ER.
The blare of the critical “CODE 99” from the hospital alert system rings out five other times in less than an hour, calling medics to scramble to a patient needing resuscitation.
It’s not chaos to them, but to an onlooker, it seems like hell.
“They’re so sick you lose them in a heartbeat, they’re that sick,” respiratory therapist Julie Eason told CNN. “They’re talking to you and then a few minutes later you’re putting a tube down their throat and you’re hoping that you can set the ventilator in such a way that it actually helps them.”
This is the truth of what coronavirus is doing to thousands of Americans, and likely will to many thousand more. It has been largely unseen because visitors are not allowed to be in hospitals, and everyone else is staying home.
