Mobile-based medical reservists trained for combat describe front lines of COVID-19 crisis in Texas
By Admin | October 25, 2020
Marcelo Gerjoi and Duncan Crow have trained to provide emergency medical services during combat.
Their deployment to Texas over the summer as part of a COVID-19 response unit was not a war, but at times, it must have felt like it.
“The workload was very, very demanding,” said Crow, who recently graduated from the University of South Alabama. “It’s not a usual hospital shift in that a lot of med-surge and ER and even ICU places, they kind of, they have an amount of people that they deal with and they have a workload that they’re used to. This far exceeded that.”
Crow and 1st Lt. Gerjoi, a physicians’ assistant who works in try neurosurgery department in the University of South Alabama hospital system, were among about a half-dozen reservists from the Mobile-based 7223rd Medical Support Unit to serve on the Urban Augmentation Medical Task Force 7452. He described at dire situation at the hospital in Edinburg, Texas.
“At one point, there were over 60 people on ventilators. And there were people there managing these patients,” he said. “We, again, we were just there for specialized skills. Chest tubes. Intubations of codes and different things. They would get overwhelmed.”
Crow, a McGill-Toolen Catholic High School graduate from Semmes, said he was a student at South Alabama when he decided to drop his philosophy minor and study to be an emergency medical technician. Later, he added, he the “this crazy idea that I was going to joint the Army” and visited a recruiter in Spanish Fort.
In Texas, Crow said, he started working 12-hour shifts, followed by...(More)
For more information please read, Mobile-based medical reservists trained for combat describe front lines of COVID-19 crisis in Texas, by Fox 10 TV
