Page 13 - Delaware Lawyer - Summer 2021

patients who one minute were work- ing on a jigsaw puzzle at lunchtime and were found dead by dinner. Sadly, my own father suffered a similar fate while recovering in a nursing home from a hip fracture. He had eaten ice cream, his favorite food, at 6 p.m. and appeared otherwise well, until I pronounced him dead at 9:11 p.m. that same night.
Yet this sad tale is not the one I am tasked to share. My story, rather, lies in my decision to step out of the emer- gency room and onto the community streets to meet and combat this foe — COVID — right where I knew it would infect and flourish: in our most vulner- able populations. It seems I was deemed a good candidate for the task due to my previous outreach missions to the poor and homeless in order to provide them
with food, clothing, clean needles, con- doms and the reversal agent Narcan for an opiate overdose.
I knew that COVID would take hold of the homeless, the medically under- served and those with no tools or means to access the proper medical resources. I assembled a team of a half dozen brave Saint Francis emergency room nurses (and was often accompanied by a unique nurse who also happens to be our lieutenant governor, Bethany Hall- Long). We hit the streets to meet our most vulnerable populations up and down the state.
We started out at shelters, food banks, homeless camps, drop-in centers, community centers, libraries, bus sta- tions, train stations and on the streets of poor communities. My initial plan was
to take vital signs, such as heart rate, temperature, blood pressure and oxy- gen saturations, thinking that we could perhaps cherry-pick those with abnor- mal vital signs for COVID testing. I felt those most vulnerable folks would likely fare poorly should they become infected and could inadvertently become a hu- man wrecking ball of COVID spread.
Those testing positive for COVID were placed in hotel housing designat- ed by the Delaware Division of Public Health (DPH) as well as the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health. This plan not only allowed for these unfortunate individuals to “shelter in place,” but also provided a means by which I could easily care for all of them medically with “house calls” in only one or two locations. At these locations, we arranged for food, medication, cloth- ing and protective equipment to be delivered to their door, making it much more likely they would adhere to their 14-day isolation period. We were also able to offer shelter at a different ho- tel to vulnerable individuals with nor- mal vital signs or who tested negative for COVID but who suffered from ad- vanced age, mental illness, medical co- morbidities, substance abuse or chronic homelessness.
We eventually screened and tested for COVID at many more locations, in- cluding the YWCA, the Salvation Army, senior apartments, libraries, churches, chicken plants, motel rooms and in the streets of Wilmington, Dover and Sus- sex County. In this six-month-long ef- fort, we learned some disturbing and disheartening facts, the most sinister be- ing COVID’s ability to infect a person without that individual feeling ill. This unique capability allowed for an insidi- ous and unappreciated viral spread and transmission. As the virus spread, more and more people needed to be hospital- ized due to low oxygen levels and rap- idly failing health. Yet the treatment op- tions we had were initially reserved only
SUMMER 2021 DELAWARE LAWYER 11
SAQUAN STIMPSON