纽约疫情爆发及其个人损失

I was due to go on a long-planned vacation to Barbados starting March 18th, the day after New York City announced we were “shutting down.” The prospect of winding up “stranded” in Barbados to ride out the pandemic didn’t sound so bad to me, 但我的工作在召唤我. I was being groomed for a high-level leadership position in federal disaster field operations. 在纽约市新冠疫情爆发的高峰期, 这是我在职培训的一部分, I was asked to join FEMA’s New York State pandemic response team as deputy branch director for New York City at the city’s Emergency Operations Center.

We coordinated the massive temporary field hospital at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, 引进美国.S.N.S. 安慰医院船, supplied personal protective equipment for distribution to hospitals and nursing homes, and assigned the Department of Defense to supply doctors, 护士, 和其他医务人员.

我被要求专注于死亡管理方面. The mortuary system was, I would argue, 更多的 overwhelmed than the medical system. Hospital morgues were underequipped to handle the volume of decedents, and the medical examiner’s office usually only handles cases requiring investigations. Funeral homes were overwhelmed as were the cemeteries and crematoria.

In a typical three-month period, the mortuary supply chain would handle about 10,000 bodies. 在这三个月的时间里，他们有3万. At one point the number was over 1,000 per day, and no one knew where it would top off.

We set up a temporary disaster morgue in an abandoned warehouse on a pier—the Javits Center field hospital’s dark counterpart.

The city and state had mass fatality plans with thresholds that would trigger temporary internments on public lands in marked shallow burials. 我的工作是说服他们不要那样做. In the end all it took was for Mayor de Blasio to read about “mass graves” on the front page of the New York Post, 一切都戛然而止. The city settled on electric-powered refrigerated shipping containers near an electrical substation with back-up generators and fuel just in case.

By May, the numbers of Covid cases and deaths in New York had begun falling sharply. The temporary hospitals devolved into supplying medical staff and equipment to city hospitals, 死亡率的管理似乎得到了控制.

The stressful days of the response were over, but they had taken their toll. Or perhaps it was just a ticking clock whose pre-set alarm had gone off—either way, I was paid a little visit by the heart attack fairy one day on a park bench across from the Emergency Operations Center.

我被救护车带走了. The worst days of Covid in the city’s hospitals were over, 但仍然绝对不允许访客. My colleagues who followed the ambulance were not allowed entry into the hospital.

第二天早上, 手术后, I was lying flat on my back with 更多的 tubes and wires sticking out of me than the back of my TV. A nurse fetched my cell phone and handed it to me in my bed. 短信源源不断地说:“祝你早日康复,”“听到这个消息我很难过,”“真是个可怕的消息,还有一些人说:“好消息。,“很高兴听你这么说,“这是你应得的。, 你已经为此努力多年了.” Well go drop dead yourself you bunch of jerks, I thought. Unbeknownst to me, I had gotten the promotion I was training for, and I was the last to know.

当我被推进救护车时, that would be the last time I laid eyes on a fellow “Femite” through the end of summer. I was high-risk for having been in a hospital at the end of the pandemic’s surge. I was banned from showing my face at any federal facility or coming into contact with any federal employees.

At the end of June, I came down with a high fever, body aches, and other ominous symptoms. I thought it might have been Covid, but it was eventually diagnosed as Lyme disease. Federal workplace rules prohibit people with Covid-like symptoms from entering federal facilities, 所以我又回去躲病假了. Now, the regional FEMA office is mostly working remotely. Even our Response Coordination Center monitoring the hurricanes is largely done remotely.

在写这篇文章的时候, I am camping on my property in Upstate New York where I monitor the storms and conference calls with my new solar panel and cell signal booster that allow me to work from the woods until I get a deployment order—then it’s off the bench and back in the game. 祝我好运吧.

改编自帕特里克·康比尔即将出版的书 严重到流行病的程度续 Serious as a Heart Attack: A Comedic Memoir about Dropping Dead, available on Amazon under the pseudonym Jeffrey Hornbull.

阅读更多关于校友工作的故事 “在疫情时期的战壕里”.