COVID-19 5 Years Later: Fmr. Mayor Kenney and Temple doctor reflect on outbreak's impact on Philly
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- The early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020 were a critical time of uncertainty here in the Delaware Valley and in the City of Philadelphia.
Former Mayor Jim Kenney and Temple University doctor Gerard Criner were at the forefront, managing a crisis of unimaginable proportions.
Now, five years later, Kenney is retired from government and currently relaxing in Florida.
In an exclusive interview and some of his first public comments since leaving City Hall, he reflected on the early days of pandemic and how he and his team had many sleepless nights.
"The main thing that was unsettling was the uncertainty of what this was," said Kenney. "Nobody, I mean nobody, knew what this was."
FULL INTERVIEW: Chad Pradelli's interview with Jim Kenney
In early March of 2020, the urgency was palpable.
"You hope. You pray. You hope for the best, and you hope you don't lose a lot of people to the disease," he said.
Then Mayor Jim Kenney and his team had to navigate a city shutdown, school closings, and a city bank account running dry.
"I had my moments every day where I would just, you know, shake my head or lay in bed and look at the ceiling and go, 'what is going on?'" he said.
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Concerns mounted quickly that city hospitals would be overrun, leading to the creation of the surge facility at the Liacouras Center at Temple University.
"I remember standing in the empty stands at Liacouras Center, looking out at over 150 beds with the oxygen and electricity and all this other stuff," he said. "I mean, my Lord, that was the eye-opener that this was a different world now."
Kenney said he has few regrets about his handling of the pandemic, but one is the awarding of a vaccine rollout to a young student group with no health care experience.
"That was, you know, something regrettable, but we fixed it," Kenney said.
He said his lasting memory of the pandemic was how city employees, from first responders to teachers to the medical field, all came together and put their lives on the line and did their best.
"I will always have the ultimate respect for city employees because you know what? If they don't work, the city don't work," he said.
Dr. Gerard Criner of Temple University Hospital was on the front lines of care here in Philadelphia.
He said a former colleague working in Wuhan, China gave him - and his medical team - a head start in preparing for the pandemic to hit our shores. He said they started preparing after seeing the disturbing images from Wuhan.
"So, we started to prepare ourselves really in February," he said. "He Facetimes me with their unit, with him in goggles, headdress, all protective gear with his boot wrapped with duct tape and other providers in the room like that. That got my attention."
Dr. Criner said that is when his team began preparing to set up a COVID wing at Temple Hospital; organizing equipment and infrastructure and planning how to treat and protect his medical team.
"Here was the aspect of the hospital trying to get PPE to protect the staff, trying to feed people through the environmental cleaning, the transport of people, bringing people throughout the hospital to that," Dr. Criner said.
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He said the days were long - most were 18 hours.
Dozens of clinical research projects were launched for treatment, and lessons were learned.
"Anything you would do differently in terms of planning for care?" asked Chad Pradelli.
"I think the things we learned about that: don't let your guard down," he said. "You can take avian flu right now. How prepared are we right now? Not so much as what I thought we would be."
Both Kenney and Dr. Criner both said they're extremely proud of how everyone involved in local government, healthcare, and first responders came together to stem the impact of the pandemic as much as possible.
