Background: Emergency departments (EDs) need to be prepared to manage crises and disasters in both the short term and the long term. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has necessitated a rapid overhaul of several aspects of ED operations in preparation for a sustained response. Objective: We present the management of the COVID-19 crisis in 3 EDs (1 large academic site and 2 community sites) within the same health care system. Discussion: Aspects of ED throughput, including patient screening, patient room placement, and disposition are reviewed, along with departmental communication procedures and staffing models. Visitor policies are also discussed. Special considerations are given to airway management and the care of psychiatric patients. Brief guidance around the use of personal protective equipment is also included. Conclusions: A crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic requires careful planning to facilitate urgent restructuring of many aspects of an ED. By sharing our departments' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, we hope other departments can better prepare for this crisis and the next.

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In presenting the case of SS guard Hanna Schmitz from the perspective of her young lover, Bernhard Schlink's award-winning Der Vorleser would seem to represent that cutting edge of Holocaust literature interested in depicting perpetrators in a more nuanced fashion. However, this gesture toward complexitya welcome trend in itself -is not ultimately supported by the text, which insistently obscures Hanna's role in a series of crimes against humanity. The likeable narrator's attempt to come to terms with the Holocaust, which is espoused as exemplary, proves in the end to rely on a problematic conception of dual victimisation: of Hanna as victim of circumstance, and of himself as victim of Hanna. This essay draws liberally upon reception data in order to discover the manner in which the novel exploits a number of entrenched assumptions on the part of readers. Chief among these are 1) the diffuse sense that confronting the Holocaust presents a demanding burden, rendering present day observers as victims of a sort; and 2) the presupposition that moral sophistication -an attribute with which Der Vorleser has been frequently credited -is tantamount to indecision or undecidability. The real 'limits' to Holocaust fiction are thus found to inhere within both the critical climate and the unfulfilled ambitions of the novel.In the Broadway version of Cabaret there is an unforgettable song in which an older Berlin widow recounts personal and economic hardships she experienced throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and particularly during the early tumultuous, inflation-riven years of the Weimar Republic. This time around she will marry for money, not love. Starkly, the white spotlight isolates this solitary figure on a large, dark stage; and with a haunting refrain that does not lack a touch of defiance she implores the theatergoers to put themselves in her place: 'What would you do?' Any impulse we might feel to judge this beleaguered roominghouse proprietress is thereby muted. Hanna Schmitz, in Bernhard Schlink's best-selling novel Der Vorleser (1995) poses the same question, but the stakes are now much higher. As a guard in an SS unit assigned first to Auschwitz then to a women's camp near Krakow, Hanna's last assignment is to oversee inmates as they are being evacuated westward near the end of the war. One night, while the prisoners are incarcerated in a local church, an Allied bomb ignites the steeple, gradually setting the 1 My sincere gratitude to the Erasmus Institute (University of Notre Dame) for a year of fellowship leave, and to the following readers whose comments aided me in rethinking my argument: