I am Andy Ellsberg. I'm a emergency room physician. I work at Providence and I am

dealing with COVID-19 in multiple ways over the last week, I haven't been working clinically,

just because of the way schedules worked out.

And I've been working on some of the prep work

as well as some of the advocacy in terms of trying to help the state do the things

that we need them to do to minimize spread or at least slow it down and starting tomorrow I'm going to

be working clinical shifts in the emergency room at Providence taking care

of patients. So how is the Providence Y are preparing to deal with the virus?

Let me say a couple things first. One is that I'm representing kind of my opinions on how things work.

I'm not representing my group, which is Alaska Emergency Medicine Association.

And we are an independent contractor with the hospital.

So I'm not representing the hospital

with what I say.

Not that anything I'm gonna say is controversial

or anything, it's all pretty straightforward,

but I just wanna make that kind of clear.

But, so the ER is getting ready in a number of ways.

At first, we were, when we didn't have any cases in Alaska, we were trying to figure out who we would test and by what testing criteria we would go by the state was putting out and the CDC were both putting out criteria they wanted us to use. But you know we're still

watching the news and paying attention to what's going on medically and trying to decide what we think is appropriate.

So at first it was kind of ramping up the ability to test while at the same time

recognizing that for most people this

will be not a serious illness for most people you know the problem is that this has

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