NYC Doctor Gives Inside Look Into Working in a Hospital With COVID-19 Patients

The doctor created a video diary of his shift at Mt. Sinai hospital in Queens, NY, where he works in emergency medicine.

A New York City doctor gave a glimpse into his job treating COVID-19 patients in a video diary detailing his shift.

Dr. Erik Blutinger is in his first year of residency and works in emergency medicine at Mt. Sinai in Queens, NY. A video diary he created gave some insight about what the day-to-day is like for many healthcare workers, including the mental hurdles they face.

“A lot of my mentors told me that first year out of residency would be tough and super challenging,” Blutinger said in the video. “Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine [practicing] clinically out of residency as my first year as an attending having to deal with this mess.”

In one of his recorded scenes, where COVID-19 patients are lined up in the hallways, Blutinger says that the patients have all varied in age.

“I’m seeing young patients, old patients, people of all age ranges who are just incredibly sick,” he said. [Today] we’ve seen a lot more patients and they’re critically ill and doing our best to keep track, and keep on top of them, and doing our best to provide oxygen for them. But this has been the story for the past week or so and it’s just getting progressively worse.”

Blutinger also went into the critical care room where some of the hospital's sickest patients were on ventilators, saying that, lately, the room is almost always filled with patients. He noted that the equipment is all protected with plastic covering to make sure nothing gets contaminated.

He also showed the back-up tents that the hospital built for additional patients.

“As we walk through this tent, we’ve got a huge range of supplies,” he said “Each room is kinda cornered off with telehealth capability where a provider will be on the other end remotely providing guidance. As we’re getting this tent prepared, we’re gonna walk out and you can see we’ve got a ton of oxygen tanks here ready to go, and we’re about to walk into the second tent that now has patients.”

On a more positive note, Blutinger said the hospital will play a piece of “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles over the loudspeaker whenever a COVID-positive patient gets discharged, adding that he’d heard it play that day.