New Yorker June 22, 2020
During the coronavirus pandemic, telemedicine looks like the future of health care. Is it a future that we want?
The call came in to the emergency department at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital, a twenty-five-bed facility in Lebanon, New Hampshire, around 2 p.m. on a weekday in mid-March. Patient X had arrived by car, and, by the time he reached the hospital, the pain in his legs was so severe that he couldn’t move.
Jesse Webber, a paramedic, donned full personal protective equipment (P.P.E.) before going outside with a wheelchair. Since the onset of the pandemic, almost all sick people who entered the hospital’s E.R. were considered, whatever their symptoms, to be P.U.I.s—persons under investigation for covid-19.
The patient,...
Today's Sponsors
Today's Sponsor