Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, residents of hard-hit New York City have been talking about ambulance sirens and how the wailing never seems to stop.
They're not imagining things — but the reality is even grimmer than some may have guessed. A huge number of those ambulances are responding to fatal or near-fatal heart attacks suffered by New Yorkers whose true health issue may be COVID-19, the disease associated with the coronavirus.
Emergency Medical Services, the part of the fire department that runs the city's paramedic response, is responding to three or four times its average daily number of cardiac calls, with each call almost twice as likely to involve a death. According to the Fire Department of New York, or FDNY, it means more patients are calling 911 closer to death, and many more of them are dying despite the best efforts of EMTs and paramedics before they ever reach a hospital.