Top Manhattan ER Doctor Commits Suicide After Treating Coronavirus Patients

In a shocking example of the psychic toll that those fighting on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak endure, a top emergency room doctor who treated coronavirus patients at a hospital in Manhattan has committed suicide, the New York Times reports.

Dr. Lorna M. Breen, the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died in Virginia on Sunday, where she was staying with family, according to her father who discussed her death with the Times.

Her father said she had described to him “devastating scenes of the toll the coronavirus took on patients,” the NYT reported.

“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” he said.

Breen’s father, also an MD, said his daughter had contracted the virus, but had gone back to work after recuperating for about a week and a half. Then, the hospital sent her home again, but at this point her family moved to bring her back to Charlottesville, Va.

Breen, 49, had no history of mental illness, but when she last spoke with her father, she reportedly described a horrifying onslaught of patients found DOA in ambulances, all of them COVID-19 patients.