Kious Kelly coronavirus death: Nursing manager at Mount Sinai West hospital where staff were forced to wear trash bags as protection against coronavirus dies from infection while treating infected patients.
An employee at a NYC hospital where nurses are forced to wear garbage bags as gowns in the treatment of patients testing positive for COVID-19 – has died of coronavirus.
Kious Jordan Kelly, 48, died at Mount Sinai West hospital in Manhattan on Tuesday night, a week after he was admitted upon testing positive for coronavirus, reports the nypost.
Kelly was an assistant nursing manager at Mount Sinai West, which like other hospitals in New York and elsewhere have been hit by an urgent shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks and isolation gowns, which professionals describe as ‘dire.’
Underscoring the ‘desperate’ circumstances at the hospital, as new contagion cases continue to mount, a photo posted to Facebook shows three nurses at Mount Sinai West wearing black garbage bags as makeshift protective gowns.
‘NO MORE GOWNS IN THE WHOLE HOSPITAL,’ the caption on the photo reads.
‘NO MORE MASKS AND REUSING THE DISPOSABLE ONES…NURSES FIGURING IT OUT DURING COVID-19 CRISIS.’
‘The hospital should be held responsible. The hospital killed him.’
The posting led to one nurse responding, ‘Kious didn’t deserve this,’ adding, ‘The hospital should be held responsible. The hospital killed him.’
Another nurse described ‘issues with supplies for about a year now,’ during which it got ‘to the point where we had to hide our own supplies and go to other units looking for stuff because even the supply room would have nothing most of the time.’
‘But when we started getting COVID patients it became critical,’ the nurse said.
Nurses said they were ‘using the same PPE between infected and non-infected patients and…they took to wearing trash bags to stop the spread of infection.’
But there’s more.
‘We are dying on the frontlines without any supplies and equipment!’
At least four staffers who worked with Kelly have also tested positive for the coronavirus, and there are nine coronavirus patients being treated in the telemetry monitoring unit where he worked, according to the Post.
Mount Sinai West has about 40 coronavirus patients scattered throughout the building which Kelly and his colleagues had been in recent weeks tending to before himself falling week ago.
New York, now the U.S. epicenter of the outbreak, has at least 33,013 confirmed cases, nearly 18,000 in New York City alone. The statewide death toll is nearing 300.
Posted, Kelly’s nursing school classmate Annie K. Lee on Facebook:
‘I don’t want your condolences.. I want actions. We are dying on the frontlines without any supplies and equipment! Kious Kelly, Registered Nurse, lost his life to COVID19 yesterday in NYC. The life we save tomorrow may be your parents, your friends, your child’s, or yours!’
Adding: ‘GIVE your unnecessarily stocked masks, N95s, N99s, gloves, isolation gowns, and Medical Protective Gear to your local hospitals. Go to gofundme.com, search PPE, and donate money to multiple go fund me pages to support hospitals in DIRE NEED of PPE to continue batting this indiscriminating worldwide pandemic! Or BUY PPE on websites and GIVE THEM to the healthcare providers on the frontlines! Without your healthcare providers, there is no hope.’
An impending health crises as private hospitals are ill equipped to handle public health onslaught:
On Wednesday, officials in New York City were taking steps to prepare for an avalanche of coronavirus contractions, as the rate of infection continued at an alarming rate while hospitalizations spiked.
A makeshift morgue was set up outside Bellevue Hospital, and the city’s police, their ranks dwindling as more fall ill, were told to patrol nearly empty streets to enforce social distancing.
Public health officials hunted down beds and medical equipment and put out a call for more doctors and nurses for fear the number of sick will explode in a matter of weeks, overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Spain.
New York University offered to let its medical students graduate early so that they could join the battle.
Mayor Bill de Blasio predicted on Wednesday that half of all New Yorkers will eventually contract coronavirus the dailymail reports.
New York City has a population of about 8.6 million. If the current statewide mortality rate persists, deaths could exceed 40,000 in the city alone if half of all residents contracted coronavirus.
De Blasio said: ‘It’s a fair bet to say that half of all New Yorkers and maybe more than half will end up contracting this disease.’
Added, health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot: ‘We think 50 percent by the end of this epidemic, this pandemic, so by the time September rolls around likely 50 percent, but it could also be much higher.’
De Blasio also told New Yorkers not to ‘cling to the false hope’ of reopening by Easter after President Donald Trump suggested that date for lifting lockdowns.
And he slammed Mitch McConnell for ‘standing in the way’ of the funding ‘we need’ as the $2 trillion economic rescue package continued to hit snags in Washington.
Meanwhile, Governor Andrew Cuomo, again pleading for help in dealing with the onslaught, attributing the cluster to the city’s role as a gateway to international travelers and the sheer density of its population.
‘Our closeness makes us vulnerable,’ he said. ‘But it’s true that your greatest weakness is also your greatest strength. And our closeness is what makes us who we are. That is what New York is.’
