InfoSearched
Inside Elmhurst Hospital, doctors are running out of machines to keep patients breathing.
New York State’s coronavirus death toll jumped past 500 on Friday, and the hardest-hit hospitals in New York City are now describing a resource war over a single piece of equipment: the ventilator. At Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens — the facility doctors and city officials have started calling ground zero of the outbreak — emergency room lines stretch out the door and exhausted staff are working extended shifts with a shrinking supply of protective gear.
NBC Nightly News captured the strain from inside the wards, where intensive care teams are treating more critically ill respiratory patients than they have beds or breathing machines to support. The report lands the same day President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force General Motors and other automakers to start building ventilators, a step state and city leaders had been demanding for days.
- New York State’s coronavirus death toll topped 500 on Friday, with thousands hospitalized statewide.
- Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens is described as ground zero, with overcrowded ERs and dwindling PPE for exhausted staff.
- President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act on March 27 to compel GM and other automakers to manufacture ventilators.
Ground Zero in Queens
Elmhurst has become the symbol of the surge for a reason: it’s a public safety-net hospital, not a boutique academic medical center, and it’s absorbing the kind of patient volume that would strain any system in normal times. Doctors described lines out the door of the emergency room and waiting areas packed with people struggling to breathe, arriving faster than staff can triage them. Personal protective equipment — masks, gowns, gloves — is running low even as exposure risk for front-line staff climbs by the shift.
Intensive care physicians told NBC they’re now managing more critically ill COVID-19 patients than they have ICU beds or ventilators to match, a mismatch that didn’t exist in New York three weeks earlier. That gap is the entire story of the segment: it’s not a lack of doctors or nurses on the ground, it’s a lack of machines.
Rationing the Machines That Keep Patients Alive
With demand outpacing supply, some New York medical centers have turned to improvised measures that would have been unthinkable a month ago. Hospitals are converting anesthesia machines into makeshift ventilators and, in more extreme cases, experimenting with “ventilator sharing” — splitting a single machine between two patients using custom tubing splitters. Anesthesiologists and critical care specialists have warned publicly that splitting one ventilator between two people carries serious risk, since the device can’t be individually calibrated for each patient’s lung condition.
Doctors and intensive care teams say severely ill COVID-19 patients now outnumber both their ICU beds and their available breathing machines.
State officials have warned that New York will need tens of thousands more ventilators in the coming weeks to keep pace with the projected patient surge, a number far beyond what current federal and state stockpiles can supply on short notice.
Washington Moves on Production
The federal response arrived the same day this segment aired. President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act on March 27 to direct General Motors and other major automakers to retool assembly lines for ventilator manufacturing, a move governors had been pushing for as their own emergency orders piled up. The order marks a shift from voluntary industry appeals to a compulsory wartime-style production mandate, aimed squarely at closing the gap hospitals like Elmhurst are describing in real time.
State and city leaders are pairing that manufacturing push with urgent appeals for federal stockpile shipments and reinforcements of trained respiratory therapists and critical care nurses, the specialists needed to actually run a ventilator once one arrives. For related coverage of the equipment shortages and reopening debates that followed the initial surge, see several states imposing stricter coronavirus restrictions as infections continue to spike and schools face tough choices about reopening as parents, teachers weigh risks.
For now, the equation at Elmhurst hasn’t changed: more critically ill patients arriving than there are machines to keep them breathing, with new supply from Detroit still weeks away from reaching a loading dock in Queens.
‘We’ll starve to death if this continues’
Diplomats call freezing aid to Ukraine a threat to national security
Schools Face Tough Choices About Reopening As Parents, Teachers Weigh Risks
Benjamin Netanyahu may fall short in Israel election l ABC News
Breaking news: The famous film star Tom Hanks has the coronavirus