Support for (and from) our health care workers

North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset. Credit: Northwell Health
Daily Point
Physician scrubs back in
Sag Harbor resident Soumi Eachempati spent nearly two decades working as a physician, trauma surgeon and surgical ICU director.
But in 2017, he became an entrepreneur, founding Chelsea Health Solutions, a company that makes its home out of a coworking space in Southampton called The Spur.
Little did he know how his two hats would come together just a few short years later.
—Randi F. Marshall @RandiMarshall
Talking Point
Should medical professionals be paid more?
With medical staff of all kinds working virtually around the clock in high-risk wards to combat COVID-19, New York hospitals face a dilemma: Should workers be paid more, and which ones?
It’s a dicey question that hospital systems are answering differently. Northwell Health is providing crisis pay to respiratory therapists and nurses working in a variety of units, according to spokesman Terry Lynam. But residents and fellows, the young doctors and recent medical school graduates who make far less than their more-experienced colleagues, are left out.
That group faces tough times around the region. At NYU Langone, a group of residents and fellows circulated a petition calling for hazard pay, citing the risk of a “hospital-acquired infection” plus “increased hours and patient loads.”
The NYU Langone situation grew more tense when administrators inadvertently sent staff an email chain of management strategizing its response.
"Now is the time to accept the hazards of caring for the sick and do what we are trained to do and fulfill our commitment to the health care needs o f (sic) our community rather than focusing on making a few extra dollars,” one adminstrator wrote in an email obtained by Newsday this week.
NYU now plans to announce a staff-relief fund paid through philanthropic fundraising, and all medical house staff who provided clinical care to COVID-19 patients also would be bumped up a salary level notch a few months early.
Northwell is also in the “final stages” of establishing a “heroes recognition compensation fund,” said spokesman Lynam, and residents and fellows would be eligible for that bonus.
Other New York hospitals were earlier to this issue.
NewYork-Presbyterian announced on April 2 a $1,250 bonus for on-site staff.
And the Mount Sinai Health System “is paying all residents, fellows (and nurses) a regular bonus,” wrote Lucia Lee, senior director of media and public affairs.
Read more and see the NYU petition and emails here.
—Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano
Pencil Point
The world on their shoulders

Bob Gorrell
For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/cartoons
Bonus Point
A monumental day in history
No one would argue that we are living through momentous and memorable times. The coronavirus pandemic will be recorded in the history books for the huge impact it has had here and around the world.
But will any individual event that occurs on this day, April 15, be significant enough to warrant an appearance on history’s timeline? The question is worth considering because, as it turns out, April 15 is one of the most remarkable and consequential days in history.
Most people perhaps remember this day for its twin tragedies — the death of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 after he was shot by assassin John Wilkes Booth, and the sinking of the Titanic after it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912.
But that’s just the beginning of what in the United States we’ve come to know as tax day.
People were cheered by the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in 1945, and horrified by the condition of the thousands of prisoners who were barely alive. Two years later, Jackie Robinson made his inspirational debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball’s color barrier.
There also was no shortage of epochal heartbreak on this day. The Great Mississippi River Flood in 1927 submerged 27,000 square miles of land, including 14% of the state of Arkansas. President Franklin Roosevelt was buried in 1945, the Boston Marathon bombing killed three people and injured more than 260 in 2013, more than 200 girls in a school in Nigeria were abducted by Islamic militant group Boko Haram, and the Notre Dame cathedral burned in 2019.
In world politics, new Cuban leader and dictator Fidel Castro launched a goodwill tour of the United States on April 15, 1959; President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to meet with him.
In art, the first exhibition of Impressionist painters opened in Paris in 1874 with works from Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro.
Other significant cultural events on April 15 included insulin becoming generally available for diabetics in 1923, Rand McNally publishing its first road atlas in 1924, and Ray Kroc opening the first McDonald’s franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955.
But each of those cultural touchstones paled next to something that happened in 1877 — the installation of the first residential telephone in a home in Somerville, Massachusetts. Businessman Charles Williams, Jr. ran a phone line from his house on Arlington Street three miles to his office in Boston, in the same building where Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone two years earlier, and where the inventor just one year earlier had uttered the immortal words, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
Williams made the first call home to his wife and, as Alexander Graham Bell later wrote, the articulation was “simply perfect.”
With the entire universe of potential phone numbers from which to choose, the phone in Williams’ house was given the number: 1. His work phone was: 2.
As for this April 15, amid a pandemic, the No.1 and No.2 choices for a breakthrough event would be the discovery of a vaccine for COVID-19. That, alas, is more likely for April 15, 2021.
—Michael Dobie @mwdobie