A New York Emergency Room Doctor on the Frontlines

There are currently over 374,000 cases of COVID-19 in the United States, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control Numbers on Tuesday, April 7, 2020. As cases increase exponentially, emergency room doctors are risking their own lives at the forefront of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a piece for NY City Lens, reporter TuAnh Dam interviews a doctor currently on the COVID-19 frontlines. Dr. Alyssa Nguyen-Phuc is an emergency room physician in Brooklyn and is currently treating patients with coronavirus. "Every day gets slightly more overwhelming," Nguyen-Phuc tells Dam. "You have this pit of dread in your stomach like 'Where's it going to be in a week? In two weeks? Even a day?'" Dam asks her about the first COVID-19 patient she treated, and Nguyen-Phuc recalls: "It was as organized as we could have made it and in retrospect, so disorganized, because we just didn't know—didn't know what we needed, didn't know how sick he was going to be, didn't have the systems in place to properly do what we were doing."

Dam is a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a Pulitzer Center Campus Consortium member. Dam covers Manhattan for NY City Lens, a news outlet run by Columbia students. She previously worked at CBS and NBC Nightly News.

To read the full story, visit the NY City Lens website .