In N.J.’s Coronavirus Epicenter, All-Volunteer EMTs Are Working Nonstop

Even from six feet away, you can see the woman’s chest heaving as she fights to breathe. 

“Ma'am, slow, deep breaths, OK?” Joe Horowitz, a volunteer EMT in Teaneck, New Jersey, says. 

Horowitz, 21, and fellow volunteer Bobby Alexiou, 20, carry the woman across her long front yard in a chair as her family, all wearing gloevs, watches from a distance. They’ll have to stay behind. 

“Ready ma’am? One, two, three, I got you,” Alexiou says as they lift her onto a stretcher. You can hear her struggling to fill her lungs with enough air, despite the plastic tubes from an oxygen mask dangling across her chest. 

The woman is alert and conscious. It’s just a short drive to the local hospital in this six-square-mile town.

But inside the ambulance, things quickly deteriorate. 

“Be advised, CPR in progress,” Alexiou says on the radio as he speeds off to the town hospital. “Ambulance transporting one to Holy Name.”

The woman—who tested positive for coronavirus—doesn’t make it. She’s only in her 50s. 

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“That could have been my mom, that could have been anyone I know,” Alexiou says. “It was just kind of surreal, it’s happened before but I didn’t expect this to go this route.”

It’s one of the cruel twists of the disease that has ravaged through this North Jersey town: How suddenly someone’s lungs can give out. 

“With a lot of these patients that are going into cardiac arrest, they're fine one minute and then very quickly after two to four minutes they're going from fine, fine, fine ... and then they're dying,” says Perry Maeir, 34, a lieutenant with the ambulance corps. 

Teaneck was an early epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in New Jersey. The suburb of 40,000 has a higher rate of infection per capita than New York City. The Teaneck Volunteer Ambulance Corps has been at the center of the outbreak, responding to a growing number of calls—and a growing number of deaths. 

“Some of our crews are going on two, three, four, five [of these calls] a day,” says Maeir.

“What I am concerned about is, as a group, the amount of death that we've been seeing over the past two weeks—that eventually is going to take its toll on somebody,” he said. “What's it going to be like in a month from now? Four months from now?”

The unpaid volunteer crew has been working nonstop, burning through reams of personal protective equipment and responding to twice the usual number of calls. Other volunteer squads—which generally handle more than a quarter of all calls in the state—aren’t responding to any COVID-related incident or have stopped running altogether. In some cases, too many of their members are part of the at-risk population and can’t expose themselves to the virus. In other cases, they’ve simply run out of gear, according to the EMS Council of New Jersey. 

“This is a huge problem throughout the state,” says EMS Council President Barbara Platt. “The majority of the equipment is going to the hospital systems. People are forgetting that there’s someone taking those people before they get to the hospital and those people still need to be protected.” 

Jacob Finkelstein, the captain of the ambulance corps, says he’s constantly on his phone trying to buy more N-95 masks, gowns, protective eyewear and gloves. The supplies are difficult to find these days, and sometimes at more than double the price. So, they’ve gotten creative—and rely a lot on donations. 

They asked some high schools to donate goggles from their closed science labs. A local family drops off homemade face shields made with thick plastic and ribbons every few nights. And when they ran out of gowns, somebody dropped off mechanic coveralls.

The town contributes $70,000 to their budget—about 28 percent of their operating costs. Donations make up the rest.

“This is really when we’re needed the most,” Finkelstein, 24, says. “Our volunteers, they’re giving 200, 300 percent, whatever it takes to make sure that we are here.”

The work has already taken its toll on the crew. 

Nearly half the 120 volunteers are out on quarantine or worried they will bring the virus home to their family. Others are sick and at least one was hospitalized.

Volunteer Baruch Silberstein, 25, tested positive for coronavirus. So did his wife. His uncle came down with the illness, too, and was put on a ventilator after he was rushed to the hospital by the ambulance corps. 

As soon as Silberstein recovered, he went back to the volunteer corps. He says it all feels like one long, never-ending day. 

“You come home exhausted, you clean yourself and pass out and wake up and do it again,” he says. “Hopefully it’ll end soon.”

For many of the volunteers, the outbreak has already upended their lives. 

Finkelstein moved out of his family’s house into an apartment to avoid spreading the illness to his father, who has pre-existing medical conditions. Horowitz is living alone after his family decamped to upstate New York. He wanted to stay behind to help. 

“I’m lucky enough to serve my community and happy to do it here where I grew up,” says Horowitz.  

Calls come in early and often and sometimes all at once, breaking up jokes and interrupting meals. 

On a recent Wednesday, Finkelstein rushed to a nursing home for a COVID-positive patient in cardiac arrest. He was working the morning after coming off the overnight shift. 

By the time he arrived, the person was already dead inside. 

Twenty minutes after he returned to headquarters, there was another call, another patient couldn’t breathe. The woman decided not to go to the hospital. At the same time, another crew responded to another person who died before they could get there. 

Then, Finklestein was off again. An 80-year-old man was in respiratory distress. The man was rushed to the hospital as a family member watched from the driveway in her slippers. 

Finkelstein wiped down his face mask and the inside of the ambulance. It wouldn’t be long until the next call.