Last night i unfortunately had to go to the very last place in the world besides China that I wanted to go to - the ER. I had been having chest discomfort for a week and yesterday I started to have actual pain. I went to the local satellite ER for the level 1 trauma center thats 20 miles away and was eventually sent to the main hospital by ambulance. It’s the teaching hospital for a very good medical school.

In the ambulance I talked to the EMT and he said this hospital has been so inundated by respiratory illnesses over the past month that they’ve had to turn conference rooms all over the hospital into wards with minimal privacy - temporary curtains between each bed. So as they wheeled me towards the heart clinic we went through the enormous ER - there are 4 or 5 different ER areas that are basically large ERs in and of themselves - and it was crowded but no more so than usual. There is a long hallway from the ER to the heart clinic and it was empty. There wasn’t even equipment parked there and this was 10:30pm last night.

I was discharged this afternoon and when I left the heart clinic I was downright shocked. The entire long hallway going to the ERs - both sides of the hall - were filled with beds of mask covered people, some of whom looked really sick. Tons of policemen there too. It’s in a bad city so there’s always a few around but there were a lot today. Im just reporting what I saw. Maybe they have a precinct in the hospital, idk.

Regardless of whether this was influenza or something else, this hospitals ER was a mob scene. I don’t know if this overflow into the hallways happens every day, but it wasn’t that way last night. I bet I walked past 20 patients in the hallway alone and then the ERs themselves were mobbed. If we do get the coronavirus here, it will not take long to cause places like this to buckle, and this is at one of the largest and best equipped hospitals and ERs in the northeast outside of Boston and NY. From my observations, they were close to being stretched today just with flu or respiratory patients yet they still had to deal with strokes and car accidents and gunshots. Plus they have those conference rooms full of patients.

I held my breath the entire way to the exit, and lysoled my clothes off and then showered when I got home.

Just thought I’d tell you guys my experience, no speculation. A crapload of sick people.

PS When I was asking the EMT what he thought of the virus, he was the first medical pro I’ve spoken to who was knowledgable and realistic about it. He said he thought it was probably here and being misdiagnosed and the scariest part are the asymptotic spreaders. So he’s well versed. Contrast him with the EMT I saw at the grocery store last week. I asked him if local fire departments and EMTs were preparing and he said “it’s just a cold”.