Texas coronavirus disaster: “Patients only come out in a body bag”

Hospitals in various parts of the United States have again been stressed due to relentless increase in covid-19 cases and authorities are stepping up efforts to stop the second wave of the pandemic. Americans fear being in the same situation as Europeans when the average number of new infections per day exceeds 100,000.

Some 62,000 Covid-19 patients are currently hospitalized in the United States, an incredible figure, according to Covid monitoring project, an entity that monitors the evolution of the pandemic. But it is in El Paso, a city on the border with Mexico, that the most catastrophic situation is experienced: there are more than a thousand hospitalized against 6,000 in the whole state of Texas.

Texas had the second highest number of deaths in the United States, behind only New York, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. It is the twenty-second highest per capita with 69.7 deaths per 100,000 people. Despite this, many Texans would experience quarantine “fatigue”.

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“It’s a dark moment”said wednesday Ogechika Alozie, chief physician of the El Sol medical center in El Paso In the chain CNN. “The most telling word is fatigue. And there is also frustration,” he said. Texas Governor Greg Abbot has asked to use a military medical center to accommodate patients with other illnesses in order to have free beds for those affected by the coronavirus.

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El Paso also reflects problems with taking restrictive measures in a country whose federal government has not given firm guidelines against the pandemic. Faced with increasing infections, the main authority in El Paso County ordered non-essential stores to close for two weeks at the end of October. The measure was immediately challenged by the mayor and also by the attorney general of Texas.

The nurse Lawanna Rivers spoke of the “horrible” conditions in the hospitals of Not As the state grapples with one of the worst waves of coronavirus in the United States, inmates have been called in to help transport the dead to morgues.

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In a video posted to Facebook on Nov. 7, he said: “On my first day of orientation, I was told that any patient who enters the well only exits in a body bag. I saw so many people die that I felt like I shouldn’t have died. The policy at this hospital was that they only got three cycles of CPR, which only lasted six minutes, of all the codes we had, not a single patient who passed it. “

His shocking statement came as photos taken on Saturday show convicts, dressed in personal protective equipment, helping the El Paso County medical examiner’s office transport the dead to refrigerated trucks amid a number growing dead. . Inmates were paid $ 2 an hour for this work, reported the Texas Tribune.

Rivers added, “The morgue was so full of corpses they ran out of space, so once the morgue doors were opened, a body that was already in a bag rolled away. They lined them up with the rest of our living patients, as they had to keep the body there, as there was no room in the morgue. Freezer trucks had to be brought in because there are a lot of bodies ”.

The nurse said “the only way for these patients to get out of this place was in a body bag.” “The establishment I am in has surpassed the one I had in New York. I have never experienced anything like it, and I am speechless for what I just experienced in El Paso,” Rivers said. .

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National case register

the president donald trump, which continues to downplay the epidemic, has delegated management of the health crisis to state and county officials. Trump put his hopes in the rapid development of a vaccine. Positive results from Pfizer laboratory clinical trials suggest vaccinations start in late December or early next year.

Although the number of daily deaths is still far from the high levels of spring, The United States reported more than 1,500 deaths in 24 hours on Tuesday. The first wave of the epidemic never calmed down in the country, but the pollution curve has experienced three notable increases. The first in New York in the spring; a rebound in summer, particularly in the south, and a new peak in October with figures never before reached. Records are currently being set especially in the Midwest.

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