Diary of a Hospital: A Truck Full of Bodies

Tuesday, March 31: A body is transferred to a refrigerated truck, which is serving as a temporary morgue. Workers are constructing metal shelves to increase the truck’s storage capacity. Photo: Patrick Schnell, M.D. As the COVID-19 crisis continues to unfold, the medical staff at Mount Sinai Brooklyn is providing regular dispatches about their daily experience fighting the virus.

But the patients are still here and they’re incredibly sick and they decompensate [organ or system failure resulting in an urgent change in vital signs] rapidly from a respiratory standpoint. My number of ventilators in use has been climbing. I think today might have been one of the first days it has stabilized. When we spoke a week ago, it was around 30 in use, and it peaked at around 50, and now we’re at around 40. But that’s a combination of things.

Waleed Javaid, an infectious-disease specialist, walking through the hospital corridors. His mask cannot entirely hide the emotional toll this virus takes on those trying to fight it. Photo: Patrick Schnell, M.D. Nonetheless, let me pull up my mortality report from yesterday, because I haven’t seen it yet. [Pause.] So ten people died yesterday. When we last spoke, it was three or four a day.

We started putting bodies in the morgue truck last week. And it’s been used a lot. A lot. I think there’s around 40 bodies in there now. The funeral homes are having trouble keeping up a bit. So it’s not like ten people died and people go off to the funeral home. We’re accumulating a certain number of bodies here. We have outfitted it with shelves because you have to keep track of people. You have to make sure that the right family gets the right body back.

Do the doctors have nipple piercings? That’s all that really matters.

Doctors, nurses (noble callings) and patients (helpless, hoping) without proper tools for treatment and recovery is like sending brave solders to the front line without rifles. Stars Blossom, a musical prayer. via YouTube

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