Now, there are three.
It’s not over yet.
At the time, ICU nurse Tanna Ingram herself was battling the disease, after meeting the patient, he thinks.
She recovered, but found her again. “It’s like hell and backwards,” he says of 2020.
“The next six weeks will be the darkest weeks in modern American medical history,” says Veron. “We’re right during Christmas where people don’t listen.”
Cases are erupting throughout Texas. Seven-day positive cases are at record levels on average – more than 16,000 new cases are reported every day, according to Johns Hopkins University. This is an average increase of 15% compared to last week.
Lone Star State is back
About 40% of Kovid-19 patients in the hospital suffer from epidemics in other parts of the state.
Vertal Queller was evacuated about 500 miles from West Texas. He thinks he and his wife took the virus to the supermarket. She had mild symptoms. Today, he is on the mend but when he arrived the ventilator was almost put down.
“Where I live, there are a lot of people where they don’t wear masks,” he says. “It often happens that I go to the store with my wife and she and I were the only ones wearing masks and the others were not wearing masks.”
Brim Smith works with foreign exchange students and recently relocated to Columbus, about 73 miles west of Houston. The wife and mom of three also think she got the virus while shopping.
Smith says, ‘I’ve had the worst experience of my life. “Aches and pains.”
Veyron says patients are now getting sick after a long wait for medical care.
“Our average patient has gone through about 20 days until the symptoms come,” he says. Over the past few months, the hospital has used a variety of means to treat the illness.
Richard Gonzalez thought he could make it tough, so he resisted going to the hospital for a week. He has two jobs, a wife and five children, and is not sure how he got the virus.
“I got bored. The symptoms I got, when I got it, I should have just gone to the hospital or to the ER, but I didn’t. I lay in bed thinking it would go away.”
‘It’s like we forgot’
The frustration for Veron and staff continues to grow.
“Even if I give them holy water, it will be difficult for them to get better,” says Veron.
Vernon – who has been dubbed a “coward hunter” and has a car license plate that says the same thing – assured staff and a large minority community that the vaccine was safe.
Director of Emergency Services Dr. John O’Keefe was also vaccinated. He is black and says it is serious for minorities to seek treatment and be vaccinated when available.
Ke Karek said doctors are “enthusiastic” about vaccinations.
“When you watch on television, you don’t really know what the doctors are going through,” he says. “We report what we’re going through. Sometimes we’re really afraid of catching the disease.”
The vaccine may not come at a better time. The number of hospitals across the state continues to rise with 10,000 patients by Monday, according to the Covid Tracking Project, which has not been seen since July.
A total of 113,049 new Covid-19 cases have been reported in Texas in the last seven days, according to Johns Hopkins. This ranks second in the state, behind California.
The nurse, Ingram, says she is stressed by the ongoing fight against the disease, and she and others on it have given a message about the toll taken at the hospital.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” he says. “You realize we’re still taking care of these people who are risking their lives, my baby’s life is in danger, my mom’s life.
“I think we forgot, literally.”
CNN’s Haley Brink contributes to this report.
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