EVERY MINUTE IS A DAY

A heroic physician navigates the pandemic.

Meyer, an emergency room physician, teams up with his cousin, New York Times journalist Koeppel, to create a dramatic first-person account of the doctor’s experience during the first six months of the pandemic at Montefiore, the largest hospital in one of America’s poorest urban counties, the Bronx. Despite 25 years practicing his specialty, Meyer admits that March 2020 caught every hospital unprepared. “The members of this community,” he writes, “were ready for a terrorist attack, a bombing, a mass shooting, even a chemical or biological attack, but they were not ready for a virus. Covid-19 is virulent. It is highly contagious. It can kill fast, sometimes within hours. No hospital in America was ready for that.” After a quick history of the genesis of the virus, the authors hit the ground running. The city’s most overwhelmed hospital, Montefiore jumped from three admissions at the beginning of March to more than 1,000 by the end. Readers will encounter sadly familiar scenes that have been described in news reports: lines of ambulances carrying patients to the hospital, rows of refrigerated trucks carrying the dead away, mourning family members gathered at the entrance, denied entry for fear of exposure. Perhaps most tragic, Covid-19 patients die alone; even those caring for them wear protective gear that hides their face. Inevitably, most of the book consists of anecdotes of victims from the community and hospital employees. The first months saw mostly deaths, confusion, and exhaustion from caregivers, but a learning curve took hold. By summer, more patients were surviving in a better-prepared hospital, and cases were declining. The book is the result of interviews with a cross section of hospital personnel, and the testimonies are moving and heartbreaking, delivering a realistic portrait of a city hospital in crisis. It’s possible that some workers did not measure up, but everyone described by the authors performed superbly.

Touching evidence of compassion and sacrifice during the worst of the pandemic.