College Student Sends Ambulances, Volunteers To Coronavirus Fight

NANUET, NY — A college senior has wangled two ambulances and more than a dozen volunteers from his closed campus to his hometown of Nanuet, one of New York's new coronavirus hot spots. Matthew Zoda came up with the idea while home on spring break, volunteering as usual at the Nanuet Ambulance Corps.

"We got the news that the students weren't coming back to campus," he told Patch. "Here calls had multiplied. We were seeing calls doubling and tripling, really sick patients, a call volume we had never seen before."

Rockland County is one of the hardest-hit regions in the coronavirus pandemic, with 8,335 confirmed cases reported by the New York Health Department Wednesday morning. A small county with a population of about 326,000, Rockland is one of the suburban counties about which state officials have been most concerned. It was even mentioned in a White House coronavirus briefing.

• Coronavirus: Rockland County Maps Cases; Deaths Double

Zoda has been a member of 5-Quad, the ambulance corps at the University at Albany, since his freshman year. He talked to Jonathan Delgado, Nanuet's assistant chief, and then to his chief at 5-Quad, where the ambulances were not in service since the SUNY campus was closed.

It was a great idea, so they all moved fast and it took just a week and a half to put it all together.

The ambulances arrived Monday, and the students — all college EMTs, many like Zoda studying emergency management and preparedness — are coming in from as far away as Syracuse and Long Island, working Monday-Friday or Friday-Monday shifts.

Now the Nanuet corps can staff three trucks during the day and two at night, Delgado said, and having the additional people is a relief, because they're fielding an unprecedented number of emergency calls.

In Rockland, there were 213 residents hospitalized with the coronavirus another 275 residents hospitalized with suspected cases as of Wednesday morning.

"To see these college students come down and lend a hand is absolutely amazing," said Delgado, who is head of resident life at Dominican College. "They're in school, they have courses, they have families."

It's sad but good, he said. "What they experience as a college EMT and what they experience with a 9-1-1 system are different. Acute trauma, acute emergency, people in respiratory arrest — they're trained in cardiac arrest and now they're gaining experience."

The Nanuet Volunteer Ambulance Corps serves Nanuet, Bardonia, parts of New City and Spring Valley.

"They're helping the whole town of Clarkstown, helping Ramapo," Delgado said.