Nurse relates horror of ‘The Pit’: Texas hospital room for dying coronavirus patients

Nurse says overtaxed hospital in El Paso sends terminal coronavirus patients to die in a room where they receive minimal treatment.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

A nurse in Texas posted a video on social media describing the “horrific” conditions at hospitals overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, including a room where dying patients received minimal attention, the New York Post reported Monday.

Registered nurse Lawanna Rivers posted a nearly hour long Facebook video in which she talked about her time working at the University Medical Center in El Paso. She described a room she called “The Pit” that held eight of the worst COVID-positive patients who she claimed were left to die with minimal treatment and limited efforts at resuscitation.

“Out of all the COVID assignments that I have been on, this one here has really left me emotionally scarred,” she said.

“What is going on in Texas, I don’t feel like it’s being broadcast like they did in New York,” she said. “The facility I was at, they have surpassed New York.”

Choking back tears, she said, “I saw a lot of people die that I felt like shouldn’t have died … out of all the codes that we had there, there’s not a single patient that made it.”

Texas is one of the worst-hit states in the U.S,. with over one million of the country’s 11 million confirmed cases to date.

As of Sunday, El Paso had a staggering 32,687 active cases and had recorded 762 recorded deaths, forcing the city to extend a local lockdown order and resort to using several morgue trucks to store bodies, the Post reported.

Because there were so many coronavirus patients in the hospital, Rivers said she and other nurses were instructed to give each person in “The Pit” only three attempts at CPR before the person was pronounced dead, which she claimed was a significant reduction to the resuscitation efforts.

In the video, Rivers accuses the El Paso hospital of not treating COVID-19 patients aggressively enough, saying the level of care was lower than at any other hospital where she had worked.

“For some reason, the doctors there did not aggressively treat the COVID patients as they should have, as I experienced before,” Rivers said.

“Some people are still taking COVID as a joke,” Rivers said, crying on the video. “They had so many deaths that the morgue is full.”

The El Paso University Medical Center responded to the accusations, issuing a statement to local station KVIA-TV saying they “cannot fully verify the events expressed.”

“We empathize and sympathize with the difficult, physical and emotional toll that this pandemic takes on thousands of healthcare workers here and throughout our country,” the statement read.

“This particular travel nurse was at UMC briefly to help El Paso confront the surge of Covid-19 patients.”