First published in The Record, May 24, 2021

Alone, These volunteers fought the pandemic

 Do you remember the panic? Do you remember it, the streets empty of cars, the sky empty of planes? Those weeks last spring when bird calls and ambulance sirens became the only sounds on the wind? All around us the terror of death. It feels so long ago. Do you remember?

Jared Kramer remembers the old woman. She sat in the lobby of her apartment building, terrified, alone. Maybe she had the virus. Maybe she didn’t. There was no way to tell. Do you remember that? A killer in the air, and no way even to find it? The old woman asked her friends and neighbors, the people she loved, to please take her temperature. They refused.

Kramer entered the lobby. He took her hand. Together with Pete Philomey, his fellow paramedic, Kramer walked the old woman back to her apartment, where he placed a thermometer in her mouth.

“The fear in her eyes,” Kramer said. “I’ll never forget.”

Kramer didn’t know the old woman. No one paid him to be there. Instead he paid for his own training, 300 hours of it. He and his friends purchased all their own equipment, including a fleet of five ambulances. Last spring, when Teaneck was among the first communities in the United States to experience a full coronavirus outbreak, Kramer and his fellow members of the Teaneck Volunteer Ambulance Corps knew nothing about the virus. They didn’t know how it spread, or how to protect themselves. If Kramer got sick, no one knew if he would survive.

Kramer and Philomey both got sick. They can’t be sure, but they believe the virus passed to them from the old woman. Both men spent weeks in the hospital, months in rehab. Philomey accidentally gave the disease to his husband, Kevin Armstrong, who lived on a ventilator for 10 weeks. He nearly died.

The day Kramer felt well enough to walk, he returned to the ambulance corps. Philomey waited till his husband was home — and healthy enough to give his consent.

“I just almost killed him,” said Philomey, who has volunteered with the corps for 38 years. “So there’s a little bit of guilt.”

'We didn't know'

It’s healthy to forget. We cannot live in panic for long. As the vaccines spread, masks come off, and life in America returns to a kind of normal, it’s healthy also to remember how bad things got.

When we remember the panic, we must remember the heroes, too.

“I’ve had difficult calls before. But I’ve never been the patient. It was scary,” Kramer said. “This is the first time I thought I was checking out.”

Teaneck’s ambulance corps has more than 100 volunteers, said Jacob Finkelstein, a volunteer who was captain of the corps during the height of the outbreak. Over the course of the pandemic, most of them tested positive for COVID-19, he said, or displayed the symptoms. A handful went to urgent care; two or three needed emergency care. Kramer and Philomey were the only members hospitalized.

On Sunday, the corps held an awards ceremony on the lawn outside the Teaneck municipal building to honor these volunteers who risked their lives to save their neighbors. Philomey and Kramer each received purple heart awards. 

“When everybody else was in their homes, our volunteers were walking into houses where they knew the virus was,” Finkelstein said. “We didn’t know if it was treatable. We didn’t know if it was fatal. It sure didn’t look good.”

They did it alone. Usually, Teaneck’s volunteer medics are joined on calls by police officers, who stay beside them to assure the scenes are safe. Sometimes the cops beat the volunteers inside.

At the height of the outbreak, that cooperation stopped. For a while, police officers drove to the homes of COVID-19 patients to direct traffic away from the ambulances, Finkelstein said. As the disease spread, traffic stopped. So the police stopped coming.

Finkelstein remembers driving to a home in Teaneck for his first COVID call. He arrived to find a cop out front, sitting in a squad car. The officer did not get out.

“It was like, ‘Oh, he’s not going to come in. We’re alone on this one,’ ” Finkelstein said. “I thought: I don’t know if I want to do this. I’m a volunteer. It’s a choice. But I didn’t think I had a choice. Whatever the consequences are, I’m going to help this person.”

The volunteers also work closely with emergency room staff at hospitals including Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck and Englewood Hospital. The pandemic did not break those bonds. But it strained them. When he got sick, Kramer spent a few days quarantined in the basement of his house. To feed him, Kramer’s wife pushed plates of food toward his bed with a broom.

Soon, Kramer was too sick to breathe. He called the corps.

“That was the most scared I’ve ever been on a call,” Perry Maier, Kramer’s friend and fellow volunteer, told him recently. “You looked like you were going to die. Very quickly.”

The Teaneck volunteers took Kramer to the nearest hospital. The place was overrun. With no beds for new patients, a nurse told Kramer to sit in a wheelchair in the waiting room. The argument that ensued cannot be published. When he finished shouting, Maier packed his friend back into the ambulance and drove him to another hospital, where Kramer was admitted immediately.

“I look at this guy as a brother. I’m not going to let him die in a waiting room,” Maier said. “I thought the next day we would be going to his front door to tell his wife that he’s dead.”

'The moment I was cleared ... I was back here'

As quickly as it arrived, the outbreak ended. For months, the ambulance volunteers had little to do. Patients with acute COVID-19 symptoms still called for rides to the hospital. Everyone else stayed home, afraid that a trip to an emergency room for a broken toe or a bruised hip might become fatal by exposing them to the virus. The volunteers seized the opportunity to restock their depleted stores of N-95 masks and Tyvek body suits.

“We never ran out” of protective gear, said Maier, who was in charge of buying masks and gowns wherever he could. “We definitely got close to running out.”

At the height of the outbreak, Kramer and Philomey both burned vacation days, Kramer from his job running computers at Columbia University Medical Center, Philomey from his job as a salesman, to work extra shifts driving ambulances. After his friends rescued him, Kramer spent days in a hospital bed, too weak to reach for his phone and answer calls from his wife.

As soon as he was released, Kramer spent days at home listening to his police radio. He heard the clipped voices of his friends, responding to emergency calls. He wanted to join them. His body took months to recover. His mind was ready.

“It was the weakest I’ve ever been. It was frustrating to hear these calls come in and not do anything about it,” Kramer said. “The moment I was cleared by the doctor, I was back here. I was just so happy to be back.”