I recently saw firsthand how serious this is after two weeks in the ICU for a non-COVID condition. The fear and tension in the medical staff was palpable. They worked like mad to get me just healthy enough that I could finish healing at home and open up that ICU bed. (1/X) https://twitter.com/ryanmarino/status/1246602310517698560

What am about to describe is based on intuition and overheard snippets of conversation, so take it with a grain of salt.

Anyway, I got the sense that if it weren’t for COVID, they would’ve preferred that I stick around at least another couple of days. (2/X)

But there were at least two concerns militating an earlyish discharge. The first was that the number of COVID patients was on the verge of becoming unmanageable. They were bracing themselves for an exponential spike in ICU-status COVID patients. (3/X)

ICU-status COVID patients were cordoned off into one wing of the hospital. But I could tell the nurses were afraid they were about to spill over into the main ICU. (4/X)

The nurses were clearly afraid of contamination for themselves, their families, and their patients. The hospital was rationing both N95s and regular masks. I overheard one nurse have a mild freak out because the only N95 available to her had been used for four days. (5/X)