Robert P. Baird writes in the New Yorker about a physician fighting COVID-19
For Hooman Kamel, an intensivist at a Manhattan hospital, the weekend just before he started seeing covid-19 patients in his I.C.U. was the darkest time. Kamel is a witty, blunt-talking doctor who grew up in San Jose and came to medicine by way of Harvard, Columbia, and U.C.S.F. In his ordinary professional life, he is a research physician, and spends most of his time studying the causes and treatment of strokes. In early February, when there were still fewer than a hundred confirmed covid-19 cases in the United States, Kamel watched the spread of the epidemic with interest but no particular urgency. Toward the middle of that month, he told me recently, his sense of personal alarm began to kick in, not because of any change in external circumstances but because his wife was due, in a few weeks, to give birth to their second child. “There’s this sort of heightened anxiety in general when you’re expecting a kid,” he said. “So a lot of my initial interest was as a doctor in general but also personally thinking, Should we be stocking up on Purell, formula, all this stuff?”
In the weeks after the baby, a boy, was born, Kamel’s anxiety ticked up another couple of notches. Kamel, a self-professed Twitter addict, had been following reports from physicians working in and around Seattle, where the outbreak was intensifying. In mid-March, he came across a Twitter thread that supposedly reproduced notes written by a critical-care doctor working on the front lines. The notes were written in an opaque medical shorthand, and they described a hospital that was desperately short of personal protective equipment (P.P.E.) and overrun with critically ill covid-19 patients, some of whom were in their twenties and had no underlying medical conditions. “As much as you try to be rational and scientific-minded, I think the brain has a funny way of dismissing things that aren’t directly related to you,” Kamel told me. “So, even given the early reports out of China, and then the stuff out of Italy, there’s this element of, like, O.K., it’s gonna be different here, without being able to specify why it was any different.” But the notes from Seattle were a wake-up call. Within a week, he said, “I was just a complete wreck. I was looking at my son, and thinking, like, How is he going to handle life as an orphan?”