“We Didn’t Know What We Know Now”
THE FIRST TWO COVID-19 PATIENTS TO reach the emergency room at Banner University Medical Center Phoenix were a young mother and her adolescent son.
They had been airlifted from a settlement in the sprawling Fort Apache Indian Reservation 180 miles east of Phoenix. By the time they finally arrived, the mother was in severe respiratory distress and the son was dead. This was mid-March and though the staff suspected they had COVID-19, it was still so new they weren’t quite sure how to treat it.
“The mother was sick for a week, then went to a local clinic and within about two hours, she deteriorated and required a respirator,” recalls Dr. Marilyn Glassberg, division chief of Pulmonary Medicine, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, for the 800-bed hospital. “Because we didn’t know what we know now, we didn’t manage them the way we would manage them now.”
If those first two patients had been among the current wave of patients flooding into Banner Health from around the state of Arizona today, the mother at least might have had a fighting chance. Even just a few weeks later, the doctors would have known about the devastating micro-clots found throughout the bodies of autopsy patients and put her on blood thinners. They would have understood that her own immune system was killing her, and they could have blasted her system with a powerful dose of steroids to try to get it under control. In fact, if that first patient and her son had gotten sick today, state and federal officials almost certainly
