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Doctor who attended the ICU in New York is concerned about seeing so many people on the street in Colombia

Carlos Alvear Restrepo, director of the ICU of the Bellevue Hospital, the oldest in New York, spoke about the situation he lived in U.S when COVID-19 was disseminated and said what will happen in Colombia if people continue on the streets without taking the necessary biosecurity measures.

The specialist stated that although they began to adopt protocols when the pandemic started, there was no

“Time to adapt, but the hospitals were in a process of acquiring equipment, of hiring personnel.”

During that critical moment, “we learned to think outside the classical schemes, we adapted units that became ICUs,” he said.

Likewise, doctors with other specialties, such as orthopedists or obstetricians, gave their help to care for the hundreds of patients who came to the hospital with coronavirus.

And as for the intensivists, he admitted that in the New York hospital “we got to have teams of an intensivist handling between 15 to 20 patients. It was done with basic support from other specialties ”.

“It was inspiring and it made us use creativity (…) but it was also very dramatic,” he stressed.

“The city that never sleeps was taking a nap, it was sick,” he acknowledged.

Now, while visiting Colombia, he said he was concerned to see “so many people on the street, at the moment where we are experiencing the ICU crisis.”

“You can see havoc in a two or three weeks that would be catastrophic at the level of running out of beds in hospitals” and this “would affect not only patients with COVID, but those without COVID,” he said.

And he added that “it is possible that we will reach points where we do not have all this personnel.”

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