Doc Hoff’s BlogBlogProject | “Coronavirus Capacity Issue: The Effect on COVID Patients and My Experience” by Kaitlyn Keane
By: Lindsay H. Hoffman
Tags: Coronavirus, Pandemic, New Jersey, Delaware, Emergency Response

Photo by De an Sun on Unsplash

I’ve been publishing blogs written by my University of Delaware students since 2013, but this will be the first post in a pandemic. This blog, by Kaitlyn Keane, was written for my Media & Politics class and describes her experience with an emergency-room visit in the midst of an outbreak.

The biggest issue that the Coronavirus pandemic has presented is how contagious it is, therefore stopping, slowing, and tracking the spread is extremely challenging and is only made possible by staying isolated from each other. Because it is so contagious, the number of people contracting the disease is higher than our hospitals are capable of caring for, causing maximum capacity to be reached and hospital workers desperately squeezing in more beds for more patients to save more lives. It is so scary that for some Coronavirus victims, whether they survived or not depended on whether or not there was space for them in the hospital, as one specific New Jersey individual was driven to 3 different hospitals to receive care as the first 2 were “full,” but by the time he had reached the third hospital, he had already lost the fight against the virus. It is completely heartbreaking and devastating, and though many lives have been lost to this issue and cannot be replaced, it is imperative that we as a nation work together to make sure we do not face a capacity problem ever again. I did not realize the severity of the situation until I first-hand experienced it.

I had not really experienced much of anything these past couple of months as I, like most other Americans living in the northeast, have lived a monotonous life in my house. Every day seemed to have blended together, and I eventually stopped watching the news as it made me feel anxious and powerless over the situation. I did not ignore the Coronavirus pandemic, but I just could not do anything about it besides stay home and encourage others to flatten the curve by doing so, so that’s what I did, while cutting down on the amount of news I read and watched. It was not until April 12th that I really gained first hand perspective on just how scary and real the situation is.

I live in a New Jersey suburb just outside of New York City, so Coronavirus hit my region especially hard. New Jersey hit its Coronavirus peak on Easter Sunday, April 12th, with over 4,200 new cases in that day alone bringing the state total to just shy of 60,000. That day I woke up with severe stomach pains that ended up being appendicitis, and the hospital in my area was completely overwhelmed and unprepared to treat any more patients. We pulled up to the emergency room and there was a huge line of about 75 people wrapped around the side of the hospital, all standing 6 feet apart. This was because the waiting rooms had reached their capacity inside, and so had the tents. There were giant white tents that were sprawled out in the parking lots and grass areas of the hospital’s property to create more space for Coronavirus patients. I had symptoms unrelated to the Coronavirus but needed to go into the operating room to get an appendectomy, so proving a negative Coronavirus test was necessary. The rapid Coronavirus test came back negative, and as I was being wheeled into the operating room, another nurse told the nurse who was taking care of me that the operating room was too overwhelmed with Coronavirus patients who were in worse condition than I was, and they had to pick and choose who to operate on. I was given antibiotics, that thankfully worked, but the risk of my appendix rupturing was still there. I was lucky enough to recover without surgery, but I know that many people may not have been, and I can’t help but think of others who visited the hospital during the pandemic needing intensive care but being turned away because the hospitals could not “fit” any more patients.

Even with taking such drastic measures as they filled the parking lots with tents, there were still sick people, both infected with Coronavirus and other illnesses, desperately needing care that were not attended to. Surrounding high school gymnasiums as well as large recreational centers have been converted into makeshift hospitals. While these are all great ideas, these tents should have been built and these spaces should have been converted before the peak of the pandemic given the projected numbers, not during the peak. Though the extent of the pandemic was unprecedented, when infection rates started to really spike in March, it would have been most effective to create additional hospital space at this time. I understand that this is easier said than done, but it is perhaps something we can learn from as it is better to be over prepared than under prepared, as merely resources would determine whether somebody lives or not.

Kaitlyn Keane is a junior with a Communication major and a minor in Journalism at the University of Delaware.