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By :Jack Michel,MD
 
You can see the magnitude of what we need to do here and we don’t have enough people to do it right now and a lot of people are going to die as a result. We need help to save lives please. Email me at jmichel@larkinhospital.com if you would like to join us in our fight against Coronavirus, please specify which team you would like to be assigned to and include your cellphone number. 
 
Thank you, Let’s do this!
 
Team 1. COVID19 Peer Support Group
This team’s mission is to provide peer support for patients recently diagnosed with Coronavirus in English and Spanish. Need also to expand to Creole.
Current Team Members:
Wendy Oliver Pyatt – Peer support volunteer physician 
Psychiatry residents
 
Team 2. Convalescent Plasma Donations Team
This team’s mission is to obtain Convalescent Plasma Donations.
This team already has 6 donors lined up for donations next week. Each plasma donation can help save 3 patients on ventilators right now. 
Current Team members:
Patrick Dreyer – Hematology Oncology
Vanessa Samaniego- Family Medicine 
Monica Multani- Gastroenterology 
Freud Telemaque Internal Medicine
Andrea Miller- Allergy & Immunology 
Wendy Oliver Pyatt – Peer support volunteer physician 
AEGD residents 
 
Team 3. Coronavirus Fighter App Team
This team’s mission is to develop a smartphone App that will allow GPS tracking of positive patients, alerts, provide them with educational information, access to peer support, symptom reporting twice daily (with ability to deploy 911 for shortness of breath symptoms), a blog to communicate and support each other and ability to donate convalescent plasma. This App will be free to the public and be available in English and Spanish to anyone, anywhere in the world and they can connect with local health providers using it.
Current team members:
Camilo Hernandez – uboom.io Software Developer & Larkin Hospital Admitting
Gaile Sweeny – Healthcare Project Manager
Monica Multani – Larkin Internal Medicine Resident 
Orlando Suarez – Larkin VP of IT
Marcos Sanchez – Larkin Director of Clinical Research
Matteo Wise – Larkin Finance Department
Mark Abrams – 
Thomas Michel
Hernan Zornada
Amanda Park PGY4 Anesthesiology Resident
Gene Schwartz
 
Team 4. COVID19 Clinical Guidance Team
This team’s mission is to research all potential treatment methodologies for COVID19 and develop a standardized plan that can be shared with other hospitals. This includes experimental therapies under the oversight of our Internal Institutional Review Board.
Current Team Members:
Dr George Michel 
Dr Odalys Frontela 
Dr Carlos Briones
Dr John Dinh
Dr Emmanuel McDonald
Dr Pedram Rad
Dr Humberto Rios
Dr Alina Alvarez
Dr Faryal Farooqi
Dr Zaid Rana
 
Team 5. Volunteer Engagement Team:
Organizing and keeping our volunteers engaged. We have a list of about 300 volunteers that offered to provide various type of assistance. I have them organized in a spreadsheet I will share with you on Google drive. I sent them an email a couple of days ago through Constant Contact. We need people to help to go through each one and make sure to speak to them to see how they can help. I have tried to categorize them in 12 categories: volunteer, RN, ARNP, EMT, Physician, etc…
Current Team Members:
None
 
Team 6. National COVID19 Staffing Registry
This team will be in charge of responding to nurses, Physicans, respiratory techs, EMTs who offered to work with COVID19 patients, they may be needed for staffing at other local hospitals. 
The goal of this group would be to set up a free Larkin virtual staffing website to make them available to all hospitals as their current healthcare workers may get sick and need to be in quarantine. This team could work in getting their credentials organized and online for submission to any hospital that needs them. This could be a national registry that can be used anywhere in the US. We would need people with knowledge of how to put this together in a website with the needed functionalities. Also, we would need people with access to media to seek registrants so that we can have a solid source of leads. We could talk to our Apps development team about tackling this App after they are finished with the Coronavirus Fighter App.
Current Team members:
None
 
Team 7. Spanish/English/Creole Convalescent Plasma Community Engagement Team
This team’s mission is to generate community awareness of plasma donations. They will go on radio shows and TV shows and talk about how one plasma donation can save the lives of 3 people currently on a ventilator and save their life. 
They will direct listeners/viewers to call 3 numbers, one for Spanish speakers, one for English speakers and one for Creole speakers. We have a number for Spanish 786-876-6806, I just requested another for Creole and another one for English. They will hear a recording in the chosen language and we will get the caller ID report daily and forward to the Convalescent Plasma Donor Leads Team.
Currently we have the following media people willing to help:
Andrew Korge, who has an English adio show on 1210 AM
Lilliet Rodriguez de la Hoz, who has a Spanish TV show “El Show de Carlucho”.
Dr Flore Lindor Latortue, who has TV and Radio show in Creole, English and Spanish and has access to Creole media people. 
Current Team Members:
None
 
Team 8. Spanish/English/Creole Convalescent Plasma Donor Leads Team 
This team will be in charge of calling the leads generated by the Convalescent Plasma community engagement team to make sure that they have the following:
Plasma donation requires:
1. Initial positive test, we need the volunteers to get a copy of the actual positive test (it can be shared via email).
2. The patient has to be completely symptom free for 14 days before they can donate.
Once they have patients that meet these 2 conditions please refer them to our Convalescent plasma donation team. Your contact is Dr Giselle Pina, her cell is (786) 720-2068 and her email is gisellepinooliva@gmail.com
Patients who believe they got the COVID19 virus but did not get a test can be considered for plasma donation as long as they get IGG test, which will be available in the next 2 weeks, so please keep those in a separate list and we will let you know when the antibody test is available.
Current Team Members:
None
 
Team 9. Discharged/Recovered COVID19 Follow up team 
This team’s purpose will be to reach out to patients who were discharged from our hospitals after being admitted with COVID19. To make sure they maintain quarantine, follow up on any pending COVID19 results, line them up for referral to our Peer Support Group, our Coronavirus Fighter App Team and our Convalescent Plasma Donation Team. This team will also engage the community in awareness that this is not a death sentence and that people can be discharged and live after being hospitalized with Coronavirus. This team will be keeping track of discharged patients and engage them in informing the community about their recovery.
Current Team Members:
None
 
Team 10. COVID19 Contact Tracing Team
One of the best tools we have is old-school detective work: finding each sick person and figuring out who they recently interacted with. This technique called Contact Tracing, helps get outbreaks of diseases like COVID19 under control. 
In order to relax stay-at-home orders and social distancing policies we have to start aggressively contact tracing. This will keep new cases of the virus from growing into outbreaks. People in close contact with someone who has COVID19 are at risk of getting sick. Once we identify someone who is positive we ask them who has been exposed to them. Then take that list and ask those people to pay close attention to how they are feeling and to quarantine. If a person who was exposed is infected, their recent contacts have to be tracked down too. The process continues until everyone who has been exposed is our of circulation. This will stop Virus transmission. 
The CDC estimates that US would need 100,000 more contact tracers. 
This group will work on recruiting contact tracers, train them and equip them with they tools they need so that they can be most effective. I have the tool used by the World Health Organization for the Ebola Outbreak, we need to modify it for COVID19 and deploy it. 
 
Current Team Members:
None
 
Sincerely,
 
Jack J Michel MD
Larkin Health System
www.larkinhospital.com