Listen to Dr. Daryl McCartney, MD, FAAFP, who is a family physician in Statesboro, Georgia share about working in a hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic. He is a graduate of Howard University College of Medicine.
“At the time I was a Chief Medical Officer for a Health Center in southern Georgia and we had several meetings with regional, as well as internally, at the Health Center trying to brainstorm what exactly we knew of the of the virus at the time, what to expect when it came, and how we would tackle that situation… When it became noticeable that this virus was really becoming a crisis…meetings became more frequent, and our plan became more serious. I was also working as a hospitalist on weekends at the Community Hospital, so I had meetings at the Health Center as well as meetings at the hospital where we all were discussing/ brainstorming what was going on. In reality we didn't know what was going on. At that time our thought was: okay, the main issue is that when you came to the hospital was that well we needed was ventilators…” Dr. McCartney shares about the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Statesboro, Georgia in 2020.
“…We started doing mass testing everywhere… In general we kind of shut down the actual day-to-day primary care management of patients and focused a lot more on testing patients. We had drive-thru testing.. We even went to the farms and the testing on farm workers there, and that was a lot of what we were doing in the first few weeks: just testing.” Dr. McCartney recalls.
“Through the end of 2020 in the beginning of 2021 we thought we knew what we were doing. After all those meetings when we were updating protocols.. We, in the medical community, thought we knew basically everything we needed to know about this virus… Then with the Delta variant all that was thrown out, or at least most of it was thrown out, because here we found that this was a much more vicious virus than the original. It spread much faster and it was more deadly…” Dr. McCartney recollects.
“Unfortunately then came Omicron at the end of November, beginning of December 2021. Omicron was much more transmissible than the Delta variant… With the Delta variant we were having Code Blues five times a day. I mean, it was to the point you where you were working on a patient who was Coding and in the middle of that Code half team had to break off to go and see another patient who was Coding. Then when you are all finished, and you think everything’s good, all of a sudden you get another Code, at another end of hospital, so you were running consistently…” Dr. McCartney remembers.
“From what I understand the number of lives lost in the U.S. is close to a million. It’s hard to believe that in just two years we’ve lost a million souls.” Dr. McCartney states.
“Personally, my godfather's wife in Jamaica died from a result of being ill during the time of Covid. She herself did not get Covid, but she was in the hospital setting during the time of Covid and she was quite sick, but with the resources being low with everything that was going on; it was very difficult to manage her there and so she became a victim of the COVID pandemic. Even though she didn't die from COVID, she was in involved with all that was going on during that time, and so she's considered a COVID related death…” Dr. McCartney memorializes losing a relative during the pandemic.
“…She died in the hospital and her family was not able to visit her because of the limitations of going into hospital, restrictions going into hospitals, and so she was only able to communicate with family via video-chat in her last days, as I had actually experienced first-hand dealing with patients first-hand… That was really touching…" Dr. McCartney shares.
