A Bronx doctor who has treated COVID-19 patients for weeks and also has contracted the virus himself called for an end to stay-at-home measures, he wrote in an opinion piece on Monday.
Daniel G. Murphy, MD, the head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at St. Barnabas Hospital in New York City, said that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus, has passed his area, saying that it wasn’t because of lockdown measures. He argued that instead, the virus has run its course.
“I’m an emergency physician at St. Barnabas Hospital in The Bronx. I have been in the ER every day these last few weeks, either supervising or providing direct care. I contracted a COVID-19 infection very early in the outbreak, as did two of my daughters, one of whom is a nurse. We are all well, thank God,” he began, according to the New York Post.
While “COVID-19 has been the worst health care disaster of my 30-year career, because of its intensity, duration, and potential for lasting impact,” Murphy said that the “lasting impact” worries him more.
“I now believe we should end the lockdown and rapidly get back to work,” he said.
In April, there was a “wave of critically ill patients in numbers none of us had ever seen,” lasting for two weeks, he wrote.
“The wave has crested. At 1 p.m. April 7, the COVID-19 arrivals slowed down. It was a discrete, noticeable event. Stretchers became available by 5 p.m., and the number of arriving COVID-19 patients dropped below the number discharged, transferred, or deceased,” he wrote.
Murphy added: “This was striking, because the community I serve is poor. Some are homeless. Most work in ‘essential,’ low-paying jobs, where distancing isn’t easy. Nevertheless, the wave passed over us, peaked, and subsided. The way this transpired tells me the ebb and flow had more to do with the natural course of the outbreak than it did with the lockdown.”
What’s more, he’s worried about people with medical conditions who aren’t COVID-19 patients.
“We usually average 240 patients a day. For the last week, we averaged fewer than 100. That means our patients in this diverse, low-income community are afraid to come to the ER for non-COVID care,” he wrote.
Murphy said now, “inordinate fear misguides the public response,” adding that “fear of it is being over-amplified.”
“The public needs to understand that the vast majority of infected people do quite well,” he opined.
In New York City, the CCP virus is far more prevalent than people might realize, the doctor wrote, adding that many of New York City’s denizens have a COVID-19 whether they know it or not. Some 43 percent of people tested in the Bronx had the virus.
“We are developing a significant degree of natural herd immunity,” Murphy added. “Distancing works, but I am skeptical that it is playing as predominant a role as many think.”
