Our regional donation center sits across the street from the Christiana campus of the Christiana Care Health System, the state's largest single employer. Around the corner lies the regional megamall which predates the medical complex by quite a few years and across lies Delaware Park, a venerable racetrack with more recently added casino. A smaller shopping center is also across the street and the main branch of the community college has a campus at the highway exit that people take to reach the medical complex. Typically at 8AM, a lot of traffic accumulates, though not this time. Surrounding hotels have been ordered closed by the Governor except for a few people involved in the nearby medical care. The medical complex itself has active employees but also a lot of inactivated employees. Retail has all but disappeared. At the racetrack, the horses need to be fed, the slot machines don't. Our mini-metropolis looked virtually abandoned.
Inside the donor center, only modest adaptations were made. Everyone, staff and donors, wore protective face coverings but social distancing is not realistic when nurses need to take blood pressures, measure hemoglobins, insert IV access and tend to machines. The post-donation canteen still operated fairly normally.
The number of donors seemed a little less than usual for an early midweek morning, maybe a little younger crowd now that these time slots are not currently prime work hours. They are participating in an experiment to harvest post-convalescent Coronavirus plasma for transfusion to critically infected patients but it was not possible for a casual visitor to identify those donors. Mostly business as usual, fewer people and a new video system to keep the donors from getting too disengaged while they bleed out.
I leave my cell phone in the car during donations. When I returned, I opened email to find a note from a friend who departed for NY a few months ago to take a job as radiologist. I just assumed as a center of coronavirus pandemic he would be inundated with chest images to report. He noted that it really did not play out that way. There were coronavirus related images but not excessive. Offsetting that was a drastic decline in other imaging as most non-urgent care has gone into hibernation. Financially, that's a net loss for his department and a reduction in assignments for him personally.
Coronavirus has stressed medical capacity at its peak, though more selectively than I would have imagined. Those working can be overworked but everyone else lives amid suspended activities.
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