The Bronx is a \u201cticking time bomb\u201d when it comes to the coronavirus, and could soon become the epicenter for New York\u2019s crisis with the deadly virus, local health workers told native web site.<\/p>\n
The borough had 4,243\u00a0recorded coronavirus cases\u00a0as of Friday night, according to city officials fewer than Brooklyn\u2019s 6,095 cases, or Queens\u2019 7,362 cases.<\/p>\n
But the Bronx is\u00a0still ripe for a COVID-19 epidemic\u00a0because of its high numbers of residents living in multigenerational housing with a relative lack of resources, said Sumir Sahgal, the chief medical officer for Local Health Care, which provides primary, specialty and urgent care for over 80,000 Bronx residents.<\/p>\n
If primary care offices don\u2019t receive severely needed supplies soon, it \u201ccould lead to a potential explosion amongst the Bronx residents,\u201d who currently total 1.5 million, Sahgal said. \u201cIt may not be the most populated, but it is at the highest proportional risk of all counties.\u201d<\/p>\n
Saghal\u2019s staff is running dangerously low on protective equipment such as masks and gloves and to close clinic locations as caregivers themselves fall ill with the virus.<\/p>\n
Health care already record 25 members of its staff test positive for the virus including Sahgal himself, as Bronx residents visited its screening centers rapidly. Sahgal\u2019s staff has few of the N95 masks that are recommended for medical professionals and resorted to using standard surgical masks<\/p>\n
\u201cOur patients are getting sick, walking into urgent care centers and coughing on the staff and the care providers,\u201d Sahgal said. \u201cI\u2019ve quarantined myself in my home and I\u2019m taking care of my patients virtually.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steven Merahn, a doctor who works with Sahgal, said that despite the attention Manhattan and Queens have received as hospitals are flooded with coronavirus patients, The Bronx is \u201cthe true ground zero for what\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve not had the access to protective equipment and testing kits,\u201d he said. \u201cIf that doesn\u2019t happen soon, our professionals are going to be taken out of action.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sahgal said that as soon as his team saw the growth of cases in New Rochelle, with its population of 8,000 people per square mile, he knew that The Bronx which has 35,000 people per square mile and has many multigenerational families sharing often times cramped apartments was going to see \u201ca tsunami of patients who were going to be really sick.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, of more than 1,000 people that Essen has tested for the coronavirus, 50 percent of tests came back positive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re already one of the poorest congressional districts in the country,\u201d Sahgal said. \u201cThe coronavirus has the worst mortality in high-risk populations, and we have every one of those in The Bronx.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that many of his patients are afraid of going to hospitals and that if his primary care staff falls ill, patients will simply stay home.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey tell us they don\u2019t want to die in hospitals,\u201d Sehgal said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have hundreds and thousands of people dying in their homes in The Bronx like in Spain and Italy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Currently, Sehgal said that Essen has \u201cbarely\u201d enough protective equipment to last through early next week and that it faces cutbacks if it does not receive more.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll have to cut centers, we\u2019ll have to cut down office hours,\u201d he said. \u201cWe may go out and try to buy them at inflated rates, but we can\u2019t afford to because we can\u2019t pass those costs along to our patients.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the support for the primary care community will help reduce the load on hospitals and help slow the spread of the disease as they are able to locate and isolate patients who are sick as well as who need continuity of care, Merahn said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere are people with heart attacks going?,\u201d he said. \u201cWe won\u2019t be able to sustain our in-person care if our frontline staff becomes victim to the virus.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Bronx is a \u201cticking time bomb\u201d when it comes to the coronavirus, and could soon become the epicenter for New York\u2019s crisis with the deadly virus, local health workers told native web site. The borough had 4,243\u00a0recorded coronavirus cases\u00a0as of Friday night, according to city officials fewer than Brooklyn\u2019s 6,095 cases, or Queens\u2019 7,362 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":13746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1469,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-york","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13745,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13743\/revisions\/13745"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}