The weekend of Saturday, March 14, marked a turning point for Suresh K. Pavuluri, MD, MPH, a second-year resident in Emergency Medicine at the Mount Sinai Health System, who was working in the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) at Elmhurst Hospital, a Mount Sinai affiliate. It was when the national discussion about the rising number of patients with COVID-19 became a deeply personal experience for him, and “everything just shifted quite dramatically,” he says.
Early that weekend, Dr. Pavuluri noted a couple of patients with suspected COVID-19 were being treated in the hospital’s Emergency Room and Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU). That was consistent with his experience a week earlier, during his rotation at The Mount Sinai Hospital, where that hospital’s first COVID-19 patient had been treated and released.