His doctors and nurses have fallen sick, one by one.
Dr. Daniel Varga has watched many of his health care workers at Hackensack Meridian Health contract the coronavirus as the pandemic rages across New Jersey. It has led to manpower shortages at a time when hospitals — and their patients — can least afford them.
Varga has battled life-threatening contagions before, working in Dallas in 2014 when a man who traveled there from West Africa became the first in the United States to test positive for Ebola.
But “I gotta tell you, as crazy as Ebola was, I’ve never seen anything like this,” HMH’s chief physician executive said of the COVID-19 outbreak.
The coronavirus poses such a grave threat to health care workers that it has forced Varga’s hospital network to rethink the lifesaving measures it takes with dying coronavirus patients.
As medical facilities struggle with a growing number of workers getting sick or forced into quarantine, Hackensack Meridian hospitals are among the New Jersey care centers that have established Do Not Attempt Resuscitation (DNAR) policies. They aim to mitigate the transmission risks inherent in lifesaving measures, such as CPR and intubation when patients stop breathing or their hearts cease beating.
The decision, some experts say, is necessary as hospitals around the state face shortages in personal protective equipment and health care staff. But it is a sensitive and nuanced issue, especially when coronavirus patients are in isolation and family members have not physically seen them — or been able to monitor their condition — for days, in many circumstances. – READ MORE
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