At Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance, doctors and nurses are faced with what they dubbed the 'fourth wave' of COVID-19.
and Dr. Anita Sircar found herself again saying the phrase she had repeated in the halls of Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance, like the chorus to a rueful song: “Here we go again.”overnight, including a 19-year-old whose parents were already hospitalized for COVID-19. And they kept coming in that morning, one after the next.
Advertisement “I’m bummed,” said Dr. Alex Hakim, a critical care physician at the hospital. “And that’s the most eloquent words I can say about it. I’ve been extremely un-eloquent lately.Before Sircar and her co-workers launched their daily rounds, where doctors, nurses and specialists pore over the treatment plan for each COVID-19 patient in the ICU, a hospital chaplain offered up a reading. Sircar bowed her head.
Even some of her own aunts have shunned her urgings to get vaccinated, said Sircar, saying they don’t feel like they have enough information about the shot. Sometimes she feels like it was futile to spend years building her expertise in infectious disease when so many people put their trust in lurid misinformation on Instagram and Facebook.
asked not to be named because he didn’t want to worry his co-workers.Outside the emergency room of the Torrance hospital, Sircar greeted the wife of the man who had just been intubated. He was stable, she assured the woman, but “he’s very, very sick. He’s about as sick as a COVID patient can get.” Already there was talk of reinstating a tent to screen patients outside the hospital, something it had stopped doing when COVID-19 cases had fallen. Sircar worried that if the numbers continued to surge, the hospital might have to hold off on any surgeries that were not absolutely essential.
In a dim room in the ICU, she lifted the eyelids of a 54-year-old man who was sedated and on a ventilator, a gang of tubes extending from his mouth. She said good morning and introduced herself, even though it was unclear what he could hear. Her mother is now vaccinated, but Sircar still avoids sitting in the same room or driving in the same car with her. She changes out of her scrubs, doffs her shoes and showers before venturing through the shared house. She leaves home early and comes back as late as she can, trying to minimize the risk.