ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Lt. Col. Raja Talati knew something was up.
He packed a bag at his Port St. Lucie home, thinking he could be on the move. Late Saturday evening, his sergeant called with orders to be at MacDill Air Force Base by six the next morning.
“I had dinner with the family and left my house about 3 a.m. Sunday morning,” Talati, a reserve citizen Airmen and flight doctor for the 927th Air Refueling Wing, said. “I made it to MacDill around 6 a.m. Here we are now, not even a week later, and we’re seeing patients in the Bronx. Hopefully helping the people of New York.”
Within 24 hours, Talati, along with five other 927ARW airmen from MacDill, were sent to New York City to help support the COVID-19 fight.
That was Sunday, April 5.
Five days later, he’s back in his Times Square hotel room, after another 14-hour shift at a Bronx hospital.
“I’ve been to New York several times, to watch shows and things like that,” Talati said. “It was really eerie. We’d leave the hotel in the morning and walk to Javits [Convention Center], and there’s nobody else but us on the road. New York is America’s city and when we got here, it didn’t feel like America’s city, which is actually a good thing, because they did listen to the mayor and the governor and people have stayed off the streets. We’re definitely seeing a decline.”
Which is a welcomed sight, considering New York has 170,512 positive cases and counting, one-fifth of the total nationwide.
Talati said the spread of this virus isn’t something he, or his men, could have trained for, but they were ready when called upon.
“Are we prepared for hurricanes in Florida? At least we know they’re coming,” he said. “Unfortunately, this happened to us, and it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. We train, every month we’re there, and we take care of our people at MacDill and make sure they’re medically ready to head out the door…that facilitated this 24-hour turnaround.”
Now on the front lines of the fight, Talati described what he’s seen, but wouldn’t go as far as to call it a “war zone” as some have described it to be.
“I think there’s a lot of disruption. Organized disruption, if you will,” he said. “Nobody is really prepared for this…when somebody comes in from a heart attack, we’ve got a protocol. When somebody comes in with COVID-19, there really is no recipe to follow. Everybody has a different course in their disease process. There’s a learning curve for all of us physicians. I’m very honored to be here because the docs I’ve been with have really done a lot of work with it and seeing it. They’re going to help the rest of the country out, I think.”
Overall, his job was to help take the pressure off the doctors, nurses and medical personnel who have been battling this disease and treating patients since mid-March.
“I don’t know if our treatments are working,” Talati said. “I do know that we’ve certainly helped the morale of the doctors, nurses and providers here. Just by coming up, we helped that. They are, quite honestly, just tired. They’ve been working nonstop since it started. They’re just completely mentally and physically gone.”
He does see a light at the end of the tunnel, even if he’s unsure when he’ll return home to Florida. His advice is simple: keep practicing social distancing, because it’s working.
“I think they still need to stay off the streets until the epidemiologists and infectious disease doctors and Dr. Fauci says it’s safe to go out there,” he said. “Studies are being done across the world on various drug treatments, certainly there’s something in the pipeline, but until that time, we need to take appropriate measures.”
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