Twenty-year-old Lehigh University senior Sharon Getsis contracted COVID-19 in early March. She says she’s alive today because of the stellar treatment she received at CentraState.

“I woke up one day and I completely couldn’t breathe. I was having these coughing attacks. I’m supposed to be in the all clear category; I’m 20, I don’t have any prior existing conditions, I wasn’t doing anything risky and then it happened to the point that I ended up needing hospitalization. That discharge day was the best day of my life in a while, for sure,” she said.

Getis is one of the more than 500 COVID-19 patients released from the independent community hospital. When the pandemic reached New Jersey, CentraState became one of the hardest hit in the state.

The 284-bed facility reached its peak in April, where at one time it had almost 140 beds filled with COVID-19 patients.

“I like to call it a baptism by fire. We were tied in, we had actually the second person in the state to pass away here, early on. But we had a tie in with a local family that had very many ill members,” said Dr. James Matera, chief medical officer at CentraState.

Matera says the odds were stacked against his team, but they rallied together and saved hundreds of lives by adapting to treatment procedures on the fly and creating a COVID-19 response team.

“We just didn’t have that syrup, or that potion, that we could use. So if during the day somebody noticed a case and said ‘what can we do?’ We would present that case to the entire team and we’d have a Zoom and go over the things and come up with a plan of action,” he said.

That plan included implementing COVID units in the least likely of places.

“That required a lot of day-to-day, on the fly changes. There were certain units that didn’t exist, we were able to convert. There was one that was an old storage area that we actually converted into patient care just to be abale to create more capacity to deal with what was going on here. Now we are down, probably  into the low 30s currently, so that’s given us some time to catch our breath and be able to recoup a little bit,” said Thomas Scott, CentraState’s chief operating officer.

Scott says he’s confident that the hospital is well prepared for a potential second wave of COVID this winter. He says for now, they are focused on making sure non-COVID patients feel safe to come in for other type of emergencies.