Some Covid-19 thoughts
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Monday, September 29, 2025 18:59
VIEWED: 301579
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The first known suicide directly attributable to Covid-19
Quote:
Top Manhattan ER Doctor Commits Suicide After Treating Coronavirus Patients
In a shocking example of the psychic toll that those fighting on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak endure, a top emergency room doctor who treated coronavirus patients at a hospital in Manhattan has committed suicide, the New York Times reports.
Dr. Lorna M. Breen, the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died in Virginia on Sunday, where she was staying with family, according to her father who discussed her death with the Times.
Her father said she had described to him "devastating scenes of the toll the coronavirus took on patients," the NYT reported.
"She tried to do her job, and it killed her," he said.
Breen's father, also an MD, said his daughter had contracted the virus, but had gone back to work after recuperating for about a week and a half. Then, the hospital sent her home again, but at this point her family moved to bring her back to Charlottesville, Va.
Breen, 49, had no history of mental illness, but when she last spoke with her father, she reportedly described a horrifying onslaught of patients found DOA in ambulances, all of them COVID-19 patients.
Dr. Breen
Her father asked the NYT to "make sure [Breen] is treated like a hero," since she died doing her job and protecting this country from a devastating health care epidemic.
"She was truly in the trenches of the front line," he said. "She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died."
Dr. Lawrence A. Melniker, the vice chair for quality care at the NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, told the NYT that Dr. Breen was well-respected and well-liked in their hospital system.
"You don’t get to a position like that at Allen without being very talented," he said.
The coronavirus has presented unusual mental health challenges for emergency physicians throughout New York, the epicenter of the crisis in the United States. As the paper added, while ER doctors are inured to treating patients will all kinds of grisly injuries, they're not accustomed to being at risk of infection themselves, or of passing it to their colleagues.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/top-manhattan-er-doctor-commits
-suicide-after-treating-coronavirus-patients
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
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There were hundreds on hundreds of deaths every day in hospitals in NYC. I estimated about 70 a day in each hospital on average. That's one code ending in death every 20 minutes, day and night, every day, for weeks.
That's not to mention the over a thousand admissions every day per hospital.
Or the unknown number of DOAs flooding in by ambulance.
I imagine there will be a lot of EMTs and paramedics, doctors, nurses, and aides who'll be subject to suicide in the short-term.
I imagine a far greater number will have PTSD and be subject to suicide in the long-term.
I imagine the anesthesiologists who intubated a lot of people at great risk to themselves, if they find out later intubation was not only not helpful, it might have been harmful.
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Posted not anonymously on Nextdoor
Quote:
A local Nurse's story. There is a Nurse who lives a few blocks away. We got to speak to her by chance. Haven't seen her in a long time. Asked how she was doing, and she responded with tears in her eyes. She said she is overwhelmed by the hours she puts in. Her main location is PIH, where she does a 12 hr. day. She said she is often called to help out at other Hospitals, which she is committed to help other health professionals. She said she often works close to a full day with only minimal breaks. We found out that reports of cases is not talked about because the priority is to try to save lives. She said she's had to use her same mask for weeks. She takes it off, and puts its in a plastic bag, and uses it again the next day. She's exhausted. Just listening to her makes you cry. We only hear how bad it is for them in the news, but to actually hear how bad it is in reality, gives a whole new insight into the suffering, on both sides. Thank you to all the health professionals, first responder for your beautiful commitment to save others. Bless you all.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
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This will be like many of our recent, endless wars that chew up Americans, to be disposed later, quietly, one by one. Out of sight, out of mind.
If you weren't there, if you didn't know someone personally who it affected, it's just another story about someone else that's not real.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I gave you a ton of suggestions.
You silently shrugged.
I'm not going to respond to any more of your whinging about your relatives. If you can't be bothered, then neither can I.
Quote:That's your careless reading again. I made a ton of suggestions that don't involve YOU calling them to chit-chat, or driving there.
JACK:
Your suggestions were call them (which I do) and drive down to my brother (which I can't).
My offer for him to live here temporarily is always on the table. They were going to do it and then all of the sudden they got cold feet about it. They're afraid that he can't go back to his place if things get even worse and more locked down in Illinois. His building is nearly all senior citizens outside of him and a few other younger people with disabilities.
It probably wouldn't help him too much if he was here. At least I could make sure he wasn't going to start drinking, but he still can't go to church or really do anything. It would make the old man feel better though.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
And get other relatives to call him OFTEN.
Ask him who's in his church group.
Get THEM to call him OFTEN.
Be observant and proactive. If there's something that he's not doing now that he used to do, find a way to make it happen in some fashion.
Get him out of the house.
Read his favorite bible passages over the phone.
Yes, it'll take time and effort. You may need to go WAY out of your comfort zone and spend a HUGE amount of time and effort.
You'll need to call your relatives and get them on board.
You'll need to suss out his church. You'll need to suss out those people. You'll need to get THEM on board to call him and establish regular, reliable contact - something he can count on, besides you. (ETA: as long as they don't try and cheer him out of his rut, or try to keep up an endlessly cheery facade with the expectation he'll join them. Their conversations should engage him in immediate things that are not COVID.)
If he has a doctor/ neurologist/ psychologist/ psychiatrist you might let them know what's going on. There's always a chance his depression is partially neurology-driven and so you might be fighting against the tide without medical help.
If he's drinking, how is he getting his alcohol? Stinkin' thinkin' and drinkin' can lead him to attempt suicide. It sounds like he's in an assisted care residence. Can you find a way to interrupt the drinkin' by finding out how he's getting it? Can you enlist the residence? Because they may be able to interrupt the drinkin'.
What can he do outside of his dwelling? Does he have a hobby or interest that can take him out of his depressed rut?
Does he have a reliable routine? Can you encourage that? I remember a friend talking to his mother every day when she was depressed. : Ma, did you take your medicine? Did you eat breakfast? How are you doing for food? Tell me, what's in your frig. Did you talk with (relative) today yet? Oh really?! How's she doing? : Being depressed often means you give up on regular daily at-home routines. Reestablishing them can help.
I have far more experience with that situation than I've posted about because (for the most part) I don't intrude on other people's privacy. If I posted about my experiences, I'd be posting about those people, too, which I almost never do (as you may have noticed). But there are things you can do to help. You can't guarantee results, but you can do whatever is in your power, and there's a lot of options.
He doesn't have a routine now. I can tell that it's bad because he says even though he tries to go to sleep by 3AM he's staying up until 6 to 7AM a lot of the nights and some nights he's not even going to sleep. I told him that he's got to make a routine for himself, even if it's
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Good luck Jack. I hope you can help your brother.
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Thanks Brenda. :)
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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I'm glad you have a plan! I hope all goes well.
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Ezra Klein asked:
I was looking back at a paper you published in 2015 about preparing for pandemics. And the point you made there that was telling: We are constantly rehearsing for war against an enemy of another country. We’re constantly rehearsing as part of NATO or US military war games.
Pandemics are a well-known thing, they’ve happened throughout history. We knew one was going to come eventually. And we were not doing these pre-rehearsals. Why do you think it is that we are so much more focused on threats from each other than threats that come from nature?
Bill Gates answered:
I think part of it is that the minor epidemics we had really didn’t hit the US. If you look at the Asian countries that did well, many of them wrote down: step one, identify all PCR machines. [Polymerase chain reaction machines, used by laboratories to copy small segments of DNA.] Step two: get supplies for PCR machines. We haven’t done that in a reasonable way today, even though we have more machines per capita than anybody else.
Places like Taiwan or South Korea, because they were hit with MERS or SARS, had the playbook. They opened the playbook, they went through those steps, and it’s saved them 10 percent of GDP and immense human suffering that they took respiratory disease in a serious way.
The fact that a novel infectious disease hasn’t been in this country for so long allowed us to not think about it as a priority. I wish I’d been more successful in getting these investments made in advance. I think back: How could I have been louder, more articulate? Very little was done.
More at www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/2020/4/27/21236270/bill-gates-coronavi
rus-covid-19-plan-vaccines-conspiracies-podcast
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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