Rodrigo Saval, the Mount Sinai Health System’s first inpatient, center, became Mount Sinai West’s 500th COVID-19 discharge patient.
The Mount Sinai Health System’s annual Crystal Party—a festive fundraiser held each year under a tent large enough to accommodate more than 1,000 attendees in the Central Park Conservatory Garden—was replaced this year by a moving 50-minute video called the Crystal Virtual Tribute. Streamed to hundreds of viewers at 7 pm on Thursday, May 6, the video honored Mount Sinai’s front-line health care workers, scientists, and students who helped save thousands of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the participants provided first-hand accounts of the fear and bravery they encountered during the dark, early days of the pandemic last spring and showed how the Mount Sinai Health System came together to beat back an unknown pathogen.
Kenneth L. Davis, MD
“It has been more than 400 days since the world as we knew it changed completely,” said Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, in the Crystal Tribute’s opening remarks. “Nurses went beyond the call of duty, taking on extra shifts and overtime. Doctors overcame unprecedented challenges, doubling up patients in rooms and fighting to secure enough ventilators to keep the severely ill alive. Scientists and physicians worked tirelessly to discover the very best treatments. And many of you made generous donations to make sure our staff had the PPE (personal protective equipment) and housing we needed to save lives and to facilitate our science,” Dr. Davis said.
“Day in and day out through the terrifying early weeks and the heartbreaking months that followed, through the depths of the pandemic and still to this day, our staff dealt with unspeakable tragedy. Our clinicians made some of the biggest breakthroughs in how to improve patient outcomes and treat the virus. And it was Mount Sinai virologists who developed the nation’s first antibody test. These men and women on the front lines not only saved lives; they saved the city of New York.”
Nurse Manager Jamie Ruhmshottel, BSN, RN-BC, at The Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH), recalled, “There was an angel looking out for me making sure I didn’t get sick and I didn’t run out of fuel and kept going to serve my purpose.”
Jamie Ruhmshottel, BSN, RN-BC, left, with a colleague at The Mount Sinai Hospital
With so many patients on ventilators and families unable to accompany them into the hospital, communication was challenging. Valerie Burgos-Kneeland, DNP, RN, Intensive Care Unit, MSH, said she was determined to give patients the individual respect they deserved. She asked the hospital’s social workers to find out from the patients’ families what the patients liked to do so the staff caring for them would know, “They have lives and families out there who they’re looking to give back to. And they have things they want to do in their life. They’re not done yet.”
The Critical Care Unit at Mount Sinai Queens was filled with so many COVID-19 patients requiring oxygen that it ran out of space and began treating patients in hallways and closed rooms, which would have been unthinkable under different circumstances. Among those requiring intubation was one of their own, Chief Physician Assistant Jimmy Lee, PA, who had been an indispensable member of the hospital’s Critical Care team.
Ugo Ezenkwele, MD, MPH, Chief of Emergency Medicine, Mount Sinai Queens, said the staff understood they could become as sick as their colleague Mr. Lee, but they also knew they had to keep going. “We sort of felt like this was a defining moment. You saw that grief. You saw that angst. You saw that uncertainty.”
Ugo Ezenkwele, MD, left, and Jimmy Lee, PA
But Mr. Lee rallied, and was able to return to the work he loves. “When we talk about Mount Sinai Queens, it is a story of people who potentially could be forgotten,” Dr. Ezenkwele added. “We are immigrants. We are first-generation. We are second-generation. We are essential workers, children of essential workers, and we are children of people who work hard. And so that’s the heart. We are the community we serve.”
Scott Lorin, MD, MBA, President and Chief Operating Officer, Mount Sinai Brooklyn, said his hospital served some of the hardest-hit communities in the city. The hospital’s first COVID-19 patient arrived on March 9, 2020. “By March 16, we were doubling our cases of COVID-19 every two to three days,” he said. Two weeks later, 220 of the hospital’s 260 patients had COVID-19. “Almost 50 percent of our patients in the hospital required oxygen. It was a proverbial war zone and no one had ever trained for that.”
Scott Lorin, MD, MBA
Making matters more challenging was the fact that Dr. Lorin and the hospital’s management team developed COVID-19 during the week of March 23. That is when the Health System stepped in to help Mount Sinai Brooklyn and deployed 200 nurses, physicians, and additional staff from its seven other hospitals.
David L. Reich, MD, President of The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Queens, said, “We came of age as a Health System during COVID-19. Our ability to move patients from hospital to hospital, to move supplies and to consider everything related to COVID care as a continuous whole, rather than as discrete, individual campuses—that made a huge difference. The coordination that was done at the system level was one of the keys to our success.”
Richard A. Friedman and James S. Tisch, Co-Chairmen of the Mount Sinai Health System’s Boards of Trustees, led an effort that raised $100 million for COVID-19 response and research.
“One of the top priorities was supporting the front-line workers,” Mr. Tisch said. “Everybody had enormous empathy and respect for them. Trustees just wanted to know what they could do to help out.”
Mr. Friedman said, “This wasn’t even a case of, ‘Well, do I give? Do I not give?’ This was, ‘How much can I give?’”
Nurses at Mount Sinai Queens created a rock garden of hope during the height of the pandemic.
The funding helped support Mount Sinai’s scientific work. “I immediately resourced the money to our scientists who were doing groundbreaking research that ultimately saved lives,” said Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System.
One of the beneficiaries of the funding was the laboratory of Florian Krammer, PhD, Mount Sinai Professor in Vaccinology, which was the first in the United States to create a test to determine whether an individual had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Icahn Mount Sinai, was among the physician-scientists on the front lines. Dr. Merad organized teams of students and researchers to collect and analyze patients’ blood samples in order to find treatments for COVID-19.
The steps that faculty, staff, and students took to serve patients and find cures during such a dark time marked a pivotal moment in the history of Mount Sinai.
“The miracles that happened at Mount Sinai were made possible by the culture of this special place,” said Dr. Davis. “From our faculty to our administration, from our labs to our exam rooms, everything is centered on collaborating to provide the best possible care. And that commitment put Mount Sinai at the forefront of the pandemic response.”
The experience, he said, made the Mount Sinai community stronger than ever. “While we may not be together in Central Park tonight,” Dr. Davis added, “I know we’ll gather again soon under the same tent. We’ll overcome this pandemic and we’ll do it together. And I can’t wait to see you all next year in person.”
