Melniker, the vice chair for quality care at the NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, said that Dr. As of April 7, there had been 59 patient deaths at the hospital, according to an internal document.ĭr. NewYork-Presbyterian Allen is a 200-bed hospital at the northern tip of Manhattan that at times had as many as 170 patients with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. She was a lively presence, outgoing and extroverted, at work events, the colleague said. Breen not only about medicine but about their lives and the hobbies she enjoyed, which also included salsa dancing. One colleague said he had spent dozens of hours talking to Dr. She was very close with her sisters and mother, who lived in Virginia. Once a year, she threw a large party on the roof deck of her Manhattan home. She was also a deeply religious Christian who volunteered at a home for older people once a week, friends said. She was an avid member of a New York ski club and traveled regularly out west to ski and snowboard. Breen filled her time with friends, hobbies and sports, friends said. Breen’s death, her family established a fund in her honor, through the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, a local nonprofit organization, to provide mental health support for health care providers.Īside from work, Dr. “Our focus today is to provide support to her family, friends and colleagues as they cope with this news during what is already an extraordinarily difficult time.” Breen is a hero who brought the highest ideals of medicine to the challenging front lines of the emergency department,” the statement said. In a statement, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia used that language to describe her. She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died.” He added: “Make sure she’s praised as a hero, because she was. “She was truly in the trenches of the front line,” he said. She had described to him an onslaught of patients who were dying before they could even be taken out of ambulances. But he said that when he last spoke with her, she seemed detached, and he could tell something was wrong. Breen, 49, did not have a history of mental illness, her father said. The hospital sent her home again, before her family intervened to bring her to Charlottesville, he said.ĭr. Breen said his daughter had contracted the coronavirus but had gone back to work after recuperating for about a week and a half. “She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” he said. Breen, said she had described devastating scenes of the toll the coronavirus took on patients.