'The sickest patients are terrifying': How Trump's 3-ring circus conceals the horrifying reality of the pandemic

In a new piece for CNN, media critic Brian Stelter pointed out an astute observation about the coronavirus crisis. While President Donald Trump holds daily briefings on the administration's response, the American media is hampered in its ability to expose the real extent and cost of the crisis.

"We're not able to see the front lines," Stelter explained. "Or the full extent of the human suffering. We only hear about the battle through the testimonies of doctors and nurses; though the pleas of governors and mayors; and through interviews with patients who are well enough to call in via Skype."

Why is this? A primary factor is that, while chaos is erupting in hospitals as a deluge of Covid-19 cases hits, reporters and photographers aren't allowed to record the devastation where it's actually happening. This is usually the way the press brings the reality of a crisis home to its viewers and readers.

"HIPAA restrictions and media ethics issues both stand in the way of having cameras in hospital corridors," Stelter explained. "So this crisis challenges reporters to get creative."

He spoke to one emergency doctor, Esther Choo, who gave a haunting analogy: "What would the zombie apocalypse be like if we only had verbal descriptions of zombies, but could never show them?"

"The truth is, the sickest patients are terrifying," Choo said. "They are air hungry, dropping their oxygen, confused, distressed. We can never show that. But it is terrifying."

But when Trump stands in the White House briefing room and — in a performance that is played live for millions of viewers across the country — acts as though the situation is under control, there's no sense of the devastation that is sweeping the country.

He fights with governors, he insults reporters, he attacks China, and he boasts about his own (rather disastrous) performance. Often, he flat-out lies. He misrepresents the science, frequently contradicting his own experts, and he twists facts to suit his preferred narrative. Every move his administration announces is supposedly a grand, new, ambitious and unheard-of plan, even when it's revealed weeks or days or hours or minutes later that it was all nonsense. We were promised by Trump a new site by Google that would direct users to their local coronavirus testing site, if needed. The website has launched, but this key feature is entirely absent. The website mostly just links you to your state's department of health.

He's told us that the "cure is worse than the disease," but he doesn't seem to realize how bad the disease is. And much of the country may not be getting it either.

"From the tone of [Trump's] presser you'd have no clue that it's been the worst 24 hours yet in terms of infections and deaths in the US," said the Daily Beast's Sam Stein after a recent press briefing. "It's all optimism and self congratulations up there. And I suppose that is his goal."

BuzzFeed spoke to one doctor at Elmhurst Hospital center who described the horrible reality:

Elmhurst is just getting destroyed. It’s very, very gruesome. The hospital has a 15-bed intensive care unit that would normally cover respiratory patients or patients with any significant illness requiring intubation, like pneumonia, liver injury, encephalopathy, or kidney problems. What’s remarkable is that now, every patient is a COVID patient. And they’re all ARDS [acute respiratory distress syndrome, a life-threatening fluid buildup in the lungs].

There is a nine-bed medical intensive care unit — those are all ARDS. Then you have a 30-bed stepdown unit. That’s all intubated COVID patients. Then there’s the general medicine floor. That’s all intubated COVID patients. You walk into the hospital and you think, Not only is the virus infecting people — it’s infecting the hospital itself. It’s pushing out everything else. It’s all COVID. That’s insane.

To make things worse, Elmhurst, which basically is held together by a shoestring in the best of times, is being pushed to the brink.

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The ER has a huge backflow of patients. Like there might be 12 patients designated for admission but there are no beds. These people are in purgatory. The emergency room has to manage them as a team. They might be intubated and vented but just lying in the ER and waiting while ER doctors are tending to however many people they have to see on their shift. These vented patients are very complicated. You have to check blood gasses every few hours to make sure you’re pushing in the right amount of oxygen and pulling out the right amount of carbon dioxide. There are people called respiratory techs who go to school for years for that. Normally you get a respiratory tech with a vented patient, but they’re spread so thin here.

One doctor described the scene to the New York Times as "apocalyptic."

And all this is only expected to get worse. Many believe New York City is weeks away from its peak of cases, which means the hospitals will only be further strained. But Trump's three-ring circus will continue as he tries to convince the public that he has it all under control.