A New York doctor who delayed his retirement to fight the spread of the coronavirus has died after contracting COVID-19.

Dr. James A. Mahoney spent 40 years serving hospitals in low-income communities. He would work day shifts at an intensive care unit at the University Hospital of Brooklyn and then work nights across the street at Kings County Hospital Center, according to The New York Times. When he wasn’t treating clients in person, he was conducting digital visits with his regular patients from home, ensuring they were washing their hands and taking other safety precautions. 


While many New York hospitals were overwhelmed by the onslaught of patients at the peak of the virus outbreak and lacked necessary medical equipment, the University Hospital of Brooklyn was in dire straits both before and during the crisis, The New York Times reported. One of the intensive care units even had to separate patients with plastic tarps and duct tape. 

Mahoney's older brother, who is also a doctor, had stopped seeing patients. Like many older people in the medical field, he stopped working because the virus posed an especially high health risk. Those closest to Dr. Mahoney urged him to distance himself and stop treating patients. But Mahoney, 62, had been on the medical frontlines during the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic and September 11 terrorist attacks. He felt it was his duty to see the COVID-19 pandemic through as well. 

In April, he told his boss that he had a fever but insisted on continuing to treat patients from home.  At first, he was admitted to University Hospital unable to walk. Days later he was taken to Tisch Hospital, which had a blood oxygenation machine and other resources that University Hospital did not have. Five colleagues followed Dr. Mahoney as he was transferred and were with him when he died, reports The Hill. 

“I got to visit him, hold his hand,” said a colleague. “And he knew how much I loved him. And he knew how much everyone here loved him. We said a lot of things that week that needed to be said.”

Unsurprisingly, he was looked up to by young Black professionals entering the field, being referred to as their Jay-Z.

“As a young Black man, I looked at this guy and said to myself, ‘Twenty years from now I want to be like him,’” said Dr. Latif A. Salam. “When a Black medical student, a Black resident sees him, he sees a hero. Someone that you can be one day."

Dr. Mahoney himself rose through the ranks at the hospital and became a valuable asset to the community he served. He started as a student at University Hospital’s teaching college in 1982. He ended up becoming a pulmonary and critical care physician and professor at the same facility.

Dr. Mahoney joins a growing list of Black medical professionals who have succumbed to the virus. Deborah Gatewood, a 63-year-old nurse, was turned away four times from the hospital where she'd worked for decades. Gatewood later succumbed to the illness, as Blavity previously reported. Additionally, 61-year-old retired nurse Patricia Frieson died of COVID-19 after initially being diagnosed with pneumonia.

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