matic brain injury, severe burns, and
cardiac arrest, in cases where a patient
has become unresponsive.
Han said that the report was distrib
uted to hospitals, but it received no press
coverage at the time. The guidelines
got a bit of traction during the Ebola
crisis. Then, last month, it was reported
that hospitals in Northern Italy had run
out of ventilators, and were using age
as a standard to allocate machines—an
idea that the task force had rejected,
because it discriminated against the el
derly. It soon became apparent that New
York, too, might face an equipment
shortage. Samuel Gorovitz, a philoso
phy professor who has served on the
task force since 1988, said that a few
members, who had been speaking with
one another about the coronavirus,
reached out to Howard Zucker, the
state’s health commissioner. “We said,
‘Look, you have this group of people,
and we’d love to help,’” Gorovitz said.
Zucker scheduled a conference call
with the task force and the heads of a
few private hospitals, for March 16th.Fifteen minutes before the call, with
out warning, a draft of updated venti
latorallocation guidelines, specific to
the COVID19 crisis, was circulated. “A
lot of people didn’t even know that this
email had been sent,” Gorovitz said.
Still, he said, of the call, “We had a con
versation that had so much momentum
in it.” In the course of an hour and twenty
minutes, they discussed the triage com
mittees that the draft guidelines calledthe computer. So I just tell them which
local schools and churches are giving
out food.”
Child care is a problem for both the
sick and the healthy. “A lot of people
come back to the hospital to find out
the results of their coronavirus test,”
Lopez said. “One lady, she came with
her two kids, one of them in a stroller.
She tested positive, and she had a ner
vous breakdown. I had to call a fam
ily member to come pick up the kids.”
Students in Lopez’s mentorship pro
gram now take their classes virtually,
but some don’t have computers. When
schools closed, Lopez worked with
principals to distribute extras to stu
dents who needed them. One of her
mentees, a fifteenyearold named
Camilo, was living with his mother
and two siblings in a shelter with bad
Internet. Camilo’s family had one lap
top, which wasn’t working, and one cell
phone, which they shared. “There’s this
one annoying teacher, the gym teacher,
actually—he doesn’t understand what
everyone is going through,” Camilo
said. The teacher gave an assignment,
and Camilo texted him to say that he’d
have to submit it late because he had
no Internet access. The teacher never
responded, and he docked Camilo
twentyfive points for tardiness. When
the family spent a night at the apart
ment of friends, in order to use their
WiFi, the shelter kicked them out.
They were stuck in a twobedroom
apartment with five other people, until
they found a new shelter. Lopez has
been trying to locate schools or librar
ies that might provide Camilo with a
working computer.
The hardest part of the job, Lopez
said, is knowing that patients are alone.
“At first, I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“Yeah, I’ve seen gunshots, but it’s noth
ing like seeing these poor bodies dying
by themselves.”
Lopez grew up in foster care, and
she spent time in prison. She said that’s
why, when the hospital gave her the
option of staying home to quarantine,
she said no. “I was abandoned. I don’t
know my birth mother,” she said. “So
I know how these people feel who are
laying down in a bed with nobody be
side them.” Lopez gives the people she
meets her phone number so that they
can call her at any hour. “At eight
1
PROTOCOLS
WHOGETSAVENTILATOR?
I
n 1985, Governor Mario Cuomo cre
ated the New York State Task Force
on Life and the Law, a group of twenty
three experts who would advise the state
on ethically tricky publicpolicy issues.
They were doctors, lawyers, professors,
reverends, and rabbis. One was Barbara
Shack, a lobbyist who had successfully
led the effort to legalize abortion in
New York. A later addition was Rock
Brynner, a historian who had once been
Bob Dylan’s road manager and Mu
hammad Ali’s bodyguard. The group
issued policy recommendations on organ
transplantation, the definition of death,
and all kinds of things that people hate
to talk about. In 2007, the task force
took up the subject of ventilators. If
New York were to run out, who would
get one, and who wouldn’t?
The group met regularly for several
years, in a conference room at 90 Church
Street. “I remember when I first got as
signed this,” Susie Han, the chair of the
ventilatorallocation project, said. “I was,
like, This is insane.” But it wasn’t: the
task force calculated that, if a Spanish
flulike pandemic were to occur, New
York could be short by nearly sixteen
thousand ventilators. The group toyed
with different methods of allocation,
such as giving out ventilators on a first
comefirstserved basis, or distributing
them randomly, or prioritizing certain
patients (like parents and healthcare
workers). In 2015, they published a two
hundredandseventytwopage report,
which recommended a system that re
lies on “exclusion criteria”—a list of
medical conditions that would make a
patient ineligible for a ventilator. In a
ventilatortriage plan that Alabama re
leased, in 2010, these criteria included
“severe or profound mental retardation”
and “moderate to severe dementia.” The
New York task force’s list included trauo’clock at night, we take down the
table,” she said. “Hospital police deal
with the rest.”
—Zach Helfand