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  • Stories: the mental wound of the coronavirus
  • Pandemic: United States exceeds 50,000 deaths from coronavirus

The head of the emergency department of a New York hospital committed suicide last Sunday after spending many days at the forefront of the battle against the coronavirus in one of the cities hardest hit by the pandemic and after confessing to her relatives that she could not bear to see so many people die.

This is Dr. Lorna Breen and she had been the emergency medical director of NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Manhattan.

"She tried to do her job and killed her," Dr. Philip Breen told The New York Times about his daughter, who followed in her footsteps in medicine.

The father said his daughter, 49, who died Sunday, had no history of mental illness. But she said the last time they spoke, she told him how excruciating it was to watch coronavirus-infected patients die, some even before they could get them out of the ambulance.

"She was really in the trenches on the front line," Philip Breen told the Times. "Make sure she is praised as a heroine," she added. " She is a victim as much as any other person who has died ."

Lorna Breen died in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had stayed with her family for a few days, said the father, who recalled that his daughter had fallen ill with the virus while at work, but returned to his professional work after approximately a week and a half of recovery. Still, the hospital sent her home again, and her family took her to Virginia.

Two days before the suicide of this doctor, an emergency paramedic in the city, who had also worked on the battlefront against the virus, also killed himself.

It was the young John Mondello, 23, who last Friday used a weapon registered by his father, a retired police officer from New York, to commit suicide in Astoria, Queens, according to police sources to the New York Post. He had graduated from the Fire Department's Academy of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in early February, and then went directly to Station 18 at Claremont in the Bronx, which handles one of the highest volumes of 911 calls in the city.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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