Team Rubicon Responds to COVID-19 Crisis in the Navajo Nation

By Keegan Bradley, MD; and Stanley Chartoff, MD, MPH, FACEP | on August 25, 2020 | 0 Comment

Dr. Bradley is a disaster/operational medicine and EMS fellow in the department of emergency medicine at Atrium Health-Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Dr. Chartoff is assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Hartford, an emergency physician at the University of Connecticut–Hartford Hospital, and medical director of Team Rubicon Northeast Territory.

On the Ground: Personal Experience from Kayenta

Keegan Bradley, MD

Keegan Bradley, MD The day had been very typical, with plenty presenting for COVID-19-related symptoms or mainly minor complaints. I sat there wondering when we would get our sick patient that day, as we had seemed to reach the point of averaging at least one COVID-19-infected patient per day who was critically ill enough to require intubation and transport. It wasn’t soon after that we were notified there was a critical patient being brought back with hypoxia and tachypnea and concern for COVID-19. The next thing we noticed was this was not one of our typical patients but one of our own emergency department teammates…

Read the rest of Dr. Bradley’s story.

Stanley Chartoff, MD, MPH

Stanley Chartoff, MD, MPH I was on duty for my first evening shift in the Kayenta emergency department when a patient who had previously tested positive for the novel coronavirus and was short of breath was being brought back in a wheelchair. I saw on the tracking board that she was 28 years old. One of the other physicians started donning his PPE in anticipation of treating her when she suddenly slid out of the wheelchair and collapsed on the floor in front of the nurse’s station…