NEW YORK TIMES
Doctors
Except in areas where Covid is surging, there are still no lines of patients in the hospital halls.
By Pauline W. Chen, M.D.
Oct. 20, 2020, 5:00 a.m. EST
Weathered, wiry and in his early 60s, the man stumbled into clinic, trailing cigarette smoke and clutching his chest. Over the previousweek, he had had fleeting episodes of chest pressure but stayed away from the hospital.
“I didn’t want to get the coronavirus,” he gasped as the nurses unbuttoned his shirt to get an EKG. Only when his pain had becomerelentless did he feel he had no choice but to come in.
In pre-pandemic times, patients like him were routine at my Boston-area hospital; we saw them almost every day. But for much of thespring and summer, the halls and parking lots were eerily empty. I wondered if people were staying home and getting sicker, and Iimagined that in a few months’ time these patients, once they became too ill to manage on their own, might flood the emergency rooms,wards and I.C.U.s, in a non-Covid wave.
But more than seven months into the pandemic, there are still no lines of patients in the halls. While my colleagues and I are busier thanwe were in March, there has been no pent-up overflow of people with crushing chest pain, debilitating shortness of breath or fevers andwet, rattling coughs.
“It’s so weird,” a colleague remarked recently. “It’s like those people have vanished.”
I remembered my colleague’s observation when I read a recent study that suggested why those patients have never returned.