Rush-Henrietta and RIT alum tapped to run COVID-19 field hospital in NYC

Dr. Chris Tanski Jr. had been to New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center before for conventions and conferences.

Right now, however, the cavernous venue on 11th Avenue between West 34th and 38th streets in Manhattan, houses a makeshift COVID-19 field hospital. And last Wednesday, Tanski — who graduated from Rush-Henrietta High School in 1997 and has gone on to become an emergency room doctor at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse — was tapped by the New York state Department of Health to run it.

“If I ever come back for a conference, it will be surreal to think that we ran a hospital here,” he said by phone from the facility, set up by the military to act as a relief valve for New York City hospitals inundated with coronavirus patients.

Tanski, 41, is well-versed in disaster response, which is why the health department contacted his Syracuse hospital and “asked if they could borrow me,” he said. A member of the Federal Disaster Response Team, he’d answered the call many times before when asked to serve in mass-casualty incidents resulting from natural catastrophes, like hurricanes.

But his Javits site work is distinctly different, for a lot of reasons. As chief medical officer, he’s not treating patients, which currently number around 350. He’s running the facility, trying to make it work for its doctors and nurses, overwhelmingly members of the military — whom he noted are wearing personal protective equipment over long, intense shifts — and patients, the majority of whom are not critically ill.

“Every day there’s a new challenge,” said Tanski, who also is involved in overseeing medical treatment being provided on the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort, a floating COVID-19 field hospital docked at Manhattan’s Pier 90.

When your “hospital” is sprawling convention center, there’s a lot to sort out, he said. Like, for instance, how to get oxygen to patients and how to get water to them. 

“We’re figuring things out on the fly,” said Tanski, who earned a bachelor’s degree in information technology from RIT in 2000 and a master’s in education from The College at Brockport in 2006 before receiving his medical degree from SUNY Upstate Medical University in 2010. “We’ve rigged things up and done a darn good job.”

But logistical difficulties abound, even on a small scale, like not having racks to hold patients’ charts.

“That’s not a problem you have in a normal hospital,” he said.

In a couple days, he’s hoping the site will be able to provide patients with call bells, “But you can’t just take the floor apart and install wiring,” he said.

However, the last thing you want is for people with a highly contagious, potentially life-threatening illness to stray from their curtained-off “rooms.”

And the fear of contagion is real. “It’s 100 percent COVID patients,” he noted. “It’s incredibly high-risk.”

Even though Tanski spends a good part of each day in a command center (versus the site's ward), he always wears personal protective equipment, too. And there is a methodical process for putting it on at the beginning of shifts and removing it at the end that everyone has to follow, he said.

He isn’t sure how long his assignment will last. In the past, his disaster relief work has gone two weeks at the most, he said.

Meanwhile, he’s regularly FaceTiming with his young family — wife Holly and daughters Audrey, 4, and Lucy, 6 months, back in Syracuse.

“My wife, God bless her, is doing an amazing job,” he said.

It also isn't clear to him how long the Javits site will be needed.

“That’s a moving target,” he said. “It’s up to the virus. It really is. The virus is going to do what it’s going to do. We talk about a peak and a curve, but I’m not sure anyone really knows what that means.”

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Reporter Marcia Greenwood covers general assignments. Send story tips to mgreenwo@Gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter as @MarciaGreenwood. Your subscription makes work like this possible.