Covid 19 coronavirus: Los Angeles calls the National Guard to remove the bodies of virus victims

America’s coronavirus crisis has reached a new low, with its second-largest city so riddled with cases that patients are dying in hospital corridors, with morgues now overflowing.

The situation has gotten so dire in Los Angeles, a sprawling city with a population of nearly four million, that the National Guard has been called in to move the bodies to the warehouse at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Department. .

According to the LA Times, which has published detailed research into the disaster facing the city’s healthcare system, hospitals are now so overwhelmed that doctors are forced to choose which patients will receive vital care, and Los Angeles County reached 10,000 deaths from coronavirus this week and many healthcare workers are also contracting the disease.

The Los Angeles Public Health agency is so concerned about the worsening disaster that it has launched a campaign on Twitter warning that “every 10 minutes someone dies from Covid-19 in Los Angeles County,” urging people to make their grain of sand to help stop the spread as the city emerges as the new epicenter of the virus in the US.

This week, California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly told a news conference that the Los Angeles crisis was “affecting a lot of our hospitals.”

“But we know that that stretch has a limit before it breaks, before we push them into a situation where they are making the kind of decisions on resources and personnel that I just addressed,” Ghaly said.

St Francis Medical Center in Lynwood is one of many hospitals collapsing under the pressure, with ER corridors “full of sick patients.”

Intensive care nurse Scott Byington painted a grim picture of current conditions, telling LA Times patients that they suffered accidents during a typical shift.

“I’m upstairs in a Covid room, he codes, and then I go down to a Covid room, he’s coding, and then there’s a problem and I go back and forth, back and forth,” he said. “It’s all night, it’s crazy.”

Byington also described the horrifying reality of what it’s like to die from coronavirus, likening it to suffocation or drowning.

“You hope that some of these patients who are not going to survive will actually lose consciousness before this, because it’s so scary,” Byington said.

“It’s no different than probably drowning.”

On a recent shift, seven patients died in six hours, a woman suffered a stroke in the hospital lobby and another died in a hallway, and young people in their 20s and 30s also died from the virus.

The hospital is so overloaded that it faces a shortage of vital machines and oxygen, forcing staff to “pick and choose” who qualifies for care.

The LA Times reports that National Guard troops have now deployed to 13 medical facilities in the state, and experts fear that the Christmas and New Year season, and associated holidays, will lead to an even greater increase in cases in few days.

It’s a situation seen across California, with ABC7 reporting that the Riverside Community Hospital cafeteria had recently been turned into a makeshift emergency department to deal with escalating cases, and at the Martin Luther King Jr Community Hospital in Los Angels, tents have been erected outside the emergency department. .

Another LA Times report also claims that some hospitals have had to turn down ambulances and place patients in gift shops as the crisis intensifies.

The Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracking map shows that the US leads the world in numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths, amounting to 19,940,419 and 345,271 respectively.

Those devastating numbers put the United States far ahead of developing countries like India and Brazil, which have also been among the worst-hit nations as the pandemic continues its deadly spread.