TY - JOUR T1 - Suffocating in the eye of the storm: attempting to breathe at the epicentre of New York’s COVID-19 pandemic JF - Emergency Medicine Journal JO - Emerg Med J SP - 330 LP - 331 DO - 10.1136/emermed-2020-209825 VL - 37 IS - 6 AU - Lynn Jiang AU - Stefan Flores Y1 - 2020/06/01 UR - http://emj.bmj.com/content/37/6/330.abstract N2 - The phone rings. A text, a call—‘Are you okay? Is it really that bad?’ It’s 4am and none of us are sleeping. My white noise machine can’t silence the sirens that fill the night. It echoes the same repetitive message: COVID-19. It’s here, it’s been here and we haven’t reached the peak yet.We’re emergency physicians on the frontline of this global pandemic. Lynn moved to New York to start her medical career. She studied, trained and stayed in the NYP Columbia-Cornell family. An original New Yorker, Stefan returned just a few months ago to pursue an academic career post Highland Hospital residency. Little did we know we would be signing up to join a war. A war where the enemy is conniving and silent, designed to hide in hosts days before anyone notices. An enemy so smart that by the time symptoms develop, you have already transmitted the disease to several others.1 2 The enemy was spreading among us, unnamed until a few months ago: the novel coronavirus.Each day begins with a deep breath, rubbing out the sleep nestled in the bags beneath my eyes. My Uber drives through the ghost town New York City has become. Make-shift divider flapping between us, the driver … ER -