Texas.- An assigned nurse in Texas described the “horrible” conditions for COVID-19 patients as hospitals reach their maximum capacity amid an increase in local cases and some patients are sent to die. Among the most shocking claims made by registered nurse Lawanna Rivers about her time working at the University Medical Center in El Paso is the existence of a room she calls “La Fosa”, where the worst patients with positive COVID were sent to die with minimal treatment.
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Due to the large number of patients in the hospital, she and other nurses were instructed to give each person in “La Fosa” only three rounds of CPR before the person was pronounced dead, a significant reduction in normal efforts to keep patients alive.
“I saw a lot of people die that I felt shouldn’t have died,” Rivers said in a nearly 50-minute Facebook Live video posted on November 7.
The area where the bodies were accumulated was reported by local media, with unanimous horror. Twitter
El Paso is among the hardest-hit cities in Texas, which last week became the first state to record more than a million cases of COVID-19. As of Sunday, the city was fighting 32,687 active cases and there were 762 deaths recorded, forcing officials to extend a municipal closure order and resort to the use of several morgue trucks to store bodies. In his video, Rivers also accused the hospital of not treating COVID-19 patients aggressively enough, even saying that some doctors would avoid treating COVID-19 patients completely positive.
She also claimed to have witnessed preferential treatment for a doctor’s wife, who was the only COVID-19 survivor on that floor.
The nurse who guided me had a patient, they called her the patient ‘VIP’, she was a doctor’s wife, Rivers said.
“They did everything they could for that woman, there was nothing they didn’t do for that woman. And guess what? She was the only patient who came out of that ICU alive.”
NEW: Chilling video of El Paso jail inmates hired to move bodies of #COVID19 deceased patients into mobile overflow morgues. Inmates wear full PPEs & paid $2/hour. They’ve been doing this tough work since Monday, before El Paso increased to 10 mobile morgues. I cry for El Paso. pic.twitter.com/KgQBpzD1mZ — Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing)
November 15, 2020
In response to Rivers’ accusations, University Medical Center told local station KVIA-TV in a statement that although sympathetic to the medical professional, “cannot fully verify the facts expressed.”
Original source in Spanish
