HJNO May/Jun 2025

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  MAY / JUN 2025 29 numbers had exploded, and the numbers were in the thousands, and everything was canceling. The airlines were shutting down and we were fully canceling our trip. And that’s when we knew it was like the real deal, and it was coming to us soon. Allen I just remember hearing about it that winter and thinking, “Wow, that’s terrible.” Could any of us have ever imagined what it turned out to be? And just, I look back on it now and say boy, I didn’t know what was coming. Gremillion So, we started meeting as a group, Louisiana hospitals, discussing what’s called critical standards of care. What would we do if we ran out of ventilators?And who do you give the ventilator to? And how do you decide? So, we had to, from an ethical per- spective, decide. It obviously couldn’t be based on race, religion, and all that. It had to be based on could they survive if you put them on a ventilator? And who do you choose? And so, when we started discuss- ing that as a group with the Louisiana Hos- pital Association, we’d meet experts from all the hospitals. You realize that this was a big problem because some hospitals were getting to this point where they were — I think we got to close to that point — where we almost had to decide, how do you ration a ventilator or any other type of treatment? Allen I think, you know, we look back on things, and I think the problem is, in those early days, people were very sick. And I don’t think people appreciate just how sick peo- ple were. And we’ve all seen it. And I think sometimes now, in retrospect, people, you know, who did well or didn’t have any prob- lem, they’re forgetting that they never saw the patients stacked like cordwood in the hallway or the E.R. that we couldn’t get to. They never sawme swabbing patients in the over again. And then once we kind of got out towards Omicron, you felt like things were getting to be more routine, and we had a better idea of how to treat this new virus and people with the severe respiratory fail- ure, where previously, we were kind of just, “What did you do in Italy?What did you do over here? Like, what are you all doing that’s working?What’s not working?”And kind of just going with it. Phillip Allen, MD Before COVID, I was mind- ing my own business as the hospital otolar- yngologist. I had the best job in the world, and I get paid to hang around with med students and residents all day. So, my job is training residents and med students, and we take care of all the ENTs from… the hos- pital ENT. I joined the med staff office on March 1, 2020, knowing very little about anything about hospitals’work or anything else. Thank God for some of my colleagues and friends who helped me through that. But, so many memories of COVID … but for me, it was a sea change because I stepped into this new job at the exact time that the world exploded. Ferguson I remember, in December 2019- ish, started hearing stuff about happen- ing in China, and just kind of like it was in the background, and you were kind of like mindfully keeping an eye on it, but not like, you know, finger on the pulse, monitoring it every day. And then my wife and I, we had a trip planned to go to New York in early 2020, and that’s when the first cases of COVID started popping up in the U.S. and NewYork. And I remember we were kind of like refreshing the numbers on the screen about howmany cases there were, and we’re like, “Oh it’s 3 or 4 in New York. It’s prob- ably no big deal. Our trip’s in a week; we may be able to go and do this.” And then, three days out from our trip, I mean, the Amy Giarrusso, MD So, my big role, to be honest with you, during COVID was just the day-to-day operations of the office. Although I do practice clinically, at that point, the day-to-day operations were so overwhelming, trying to keep up with all the new rules every day, that that was my major focus. I think there was 67 days straight that I worked that I didn’t have a day off. Came to work at 6 a.m., had a big huddle with all of our group to talk about what had changed in the last 24 hours, because it really changed that quickly. We tried to figure out where people could be placed, where they could go, what kind of testing could be done. Everything changed that day. Steven Gremillion, MD It rapidly accelerated what we like to call integrated operating company — that is, that we integrate, and we try to do things similarly, the best way and do them alike. And then, of course, you got into the issues of stopping procedures and surgeries — all the things that came through with COVID. Cody Ford, MD I really remember we have like three floors of ICU, and that doubled overnight. And the academic service and the private service kind of got together and lit- erally just started making things happen. It was like a flurry of activity. Adam Ferguson, PA And as COVID was looming closer, we were all, you know, hyper focused on the news and watching the cases in NewYork come in and watching the cases inWashington, Oregon area to come in. And we’re like talking amongst ourselves, pre- paring for the storm. And then once COVID started coming in and we started getting positive cases, it was like Dr. Ford was say- ing, like rapid fire, like it just exploded. And then the Delta variant came out and it was kind of like re-spurring the whole thing PART TWO Amy Giarrusso, MD, associate medical director for hospital medicine; Steven Gremillion, MD, chief medical officer; Cody Ford, MD, critical care medicine; Adam Ferguson, PA, critical care medicine; and Phillip Allen, MD, head and neck surgeon and vice president of perioperative services, share their memories of that time.