The President April 5, 2020
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President:
As you are aware, the New York City area is entering the most dangerous point in this pandemic. As a front line physician in Brooklyn and Manhattan I feel compelled to let you know how dire the current situation is. Aside from the dramatic numbers of deaths in the hospitals, many are simply dying at home before accessing hospital care. We do not have adequate ventilators or high flow nasal canulas so critical in the care of COVID patients. Javits Center is being established as a “low acuity” site for patients recovering from COVID who no longer need a critical level or even a high level of care. While in theory this helps unload the hospitals, it does not help us care for the most critical and they account for the vast majority of hospitalized COVID patients. In a few days, virtually every bed in NYC and surrounding areas will be ICU beds. We are running out of critical medications such as Fentanyl, Versed and others needed to intubate and maintain ICU COVID patients. There are many other drug shortages and getting much worse by the hour. Manhattan is not as impacted as Brooklyn and Queens but those hospitals are filling up by the hour as well. We have no more time. If you and your team do not act now, many more will needlessly die.
I am respectfully requesting that you issue an executive order for the federal government to take resources such as ventilators, high-flow nasal canulas and critical medications from minimally or unaffected states and deliver them immediately to the New York City area. Once we are past the crisis these assets can be moved strategically. You are the only person now who can salvage this crisis in New York, epicenter of COVID-19.
May God bless you, the United States and the world.
With respect,
Stuart H. Ditchek, MD, FAAP
Faculty , NYU School of Medicine, Langone Medical Center
Attending, Maimonides Medical Center
Chief Medical Officer, Kids of Courage
NYPD, Honorary Police Surgeon
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
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One Response
Write the Cuomo to allow hydroxychloroquine in New York by prescription. It helps you need to be hospitalized to get it. Then you cry you don’t have enough beds. Give it early and most people would recover before being going to the hospital and being put in a ventilator or even dying.
In a March 23 executive order, Mr. Cuomo barred pharmacists from filling prescriptions for chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, its next-generation derivative, except for FDA-approved uses, such as for treating malaria or lupus, or as part of clinical trials for COVID-19.
The next day, the Democratic governor announced that the Trump administration and FDA had accelerated deliveries of the drug to New York for experimental therapies aimed at treating the novel coronavirus, adding that “hospitals will start using that drug today.”