HJNO May/Jun 2025

UNDER PRESSURE 26 MAY / JUN 2025 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS   I still have and said we were victorious. And then there was such a short break before the summer surge. And I think that people felt like they would be able to go on vacation. There was no respite. Not enough. If I got called with positives, and a posi- tive patient was somebody I knew or had in my phone or I could reach quickly, I just went ahead and called them. I felt like it was the right thing to do; and if they were our team members, I wanted them to be ahead of making a plan for not coming in. And in those conversations, I learned about their own fears, about the things that I thought that we had said 10,000 times, but they still didn’t know. And so, I knew that we weren’t getting through to people and that, until it reaches you, you’re not lis- tening — not fully, right? So, the best way to communicate is not through the TV or through a marketing campaign, but to simply talk to people and then have them spread that information as a trusted indi- vidual to the next person. And that, I felt, worked the best; and so, that was my most comfortable space, and I offered as much of my time as possible to do that, hoping that it would seed continued conversations in communities. There was a time period after the vac- cine came out where I just assumed, I mean, everybody wants this, right? I want it. And even though I’d been doing all this educa- tion, I really felt like in the spring of 2021, surely there are lots of people who are buy- ing in, and they’ll get it, because look how well we’re doing. My cousin who’s my age passed away in May of ’21. She was part of five people in her cohort who got COVID. Somebody had traveled, come back home, and they had had dinner together. The trav- eler had COVID. Three of them died. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. It was devastating for my uncle and the rest of my family. She was so young and had a young daughter. is going to be a crisis in which I need all of my attention. Somebody is going to have to come to take care of my kids.” At that time, people felt like it was very risky to obtain a test from a patient. And so, I obtained all the tests because I didn’t feel like it was risky. I felt very confident in my ability to protect myself from a contagious virus, and I didn’t want to put that on any- body else. One particular patient — and I won’t forget her because she was the first of many who looked exactly like her — we admitted her, she was in her 30s, young, African American, slightly obese patient. She was eating a bag of Doritos on nasal cannula when I walked into her room, “So sorry, I’m going to interrupt you from eating. Do you mind if I take another sample?”And she died 48 hours later, and I just couldn’t believe… So, still, without a diagnosis. Her diagnosis came in after that. I couldn’t believe that she so rapidly progressed, couldn’t believe that that’s how that would look — that we wouldn’t be able to tell when you came in and needed some supplemental oxygen but could still eat on your own, that your trajectory would change that quickly. And it’s what created some of the fear in our healthcare workers and also the chaos of not knowing how to handle so many patients at one time when you weren’t quite sure how they were going to look in a couple of days. And so, she was part of the first 23. We learned so much from them. I think from the first wave to that July period, it was again that … the fatigue of we didn’t have a long enough break. We went into disaster mode. We all pulled together. We felt victorious as the virus started going away in May, and we had testing. So, by the end of May 2020, we said, “Wow, now we have these tests that we can deploy.” We told the vet school, thank you very much, and we all made really cool cups that CMO, I was the medical director of infection prevention. And in that role in the hospital, not only do I help to make our pandemic plan; we did go through an Ebola scare. So, we had looked through the hospital at where can we put patients and cordon them off from everybody else. I also knew all the bones of the hospital. We go through plant exercises, and we know which units are really functional in terms of air handling. That helped a lot in the com- ing months. In January, like everybody else, I semi- pay attention to the news post-holidays. I knew that there was a new virus out there. That’s not uncommon, to get an alert through the year that there is some Middle Eastern or, you know, new strain somewhere where there are lots of people. Right? They come and go. And we had been through that with SARS. Early February, it felt like it was going to be something we’d have to tackle, maybe like SARS, where we’d have to have a plan. Maybe even a little bit bigger than that, but not necessarily knowing if it would touch us intimately. And so, started to pay a little bit more attention. In our medical executive committee meeting the third Monday of February, Dr. Craig Green, who sat on our medical execu- tive committee, showed me the WHO map of cases. He pulled out his phone. He said, “Have you seen this cool map?”And I looked at it. It was 6:00 in the evening, and I walked over to my office, and I sat down, and I took the pandemic plan out again. And I started drawing out plans for the hospital. Like, for some reason, it just took that moment of seeing those numbers to realize that it was going to be here, it was going to be intense, and nowwe needed to get serious. And that was, I think, a pivotal moment. I went from, “I think this is going to be a crisis that requires my attention,” to, “This