Photo of comforting moment goes viral
WASHINGTON: Joseph Varon, a doctor treating coronavirus patients at a Texas hospital, was working his 252nd day in a row when he spotted a distraught elderly man in the Covid-19 intensive care unit (ICU).
Dr Varon’s comforting embrace of the white-haired man on Thanksgiving Day was captured by a photographer for Getty Images and has gone viral around the world.
Dr Varon, chief of staff at United Memorial Medical Centre in Houston, told CNN he was entering the Covid ICU when he saw the elderly patient “out of his bed and trying to get out of the room”. “And he’s crying,” Dr Varon said. “So I get close to him and I (ask) him, ‘Why are you crying?’
“And the man says, ‘I want to be with my wife.’ So I just hold him.
“I was feeling very sorry for him. I was feeling very sad, just like him. Eventually he felt better and stopped crying,” Dr Varon told CNN on Monday, which he said was his 256th consecutive day of work.
“I don’t know why I haven’t broken down,” he said. “My nurses cry in the middle of the day.”
Dr Varon said the isolation of the Covid-19 unit was difficult for many patients, particularly the elderly. “You can imagine,” he said. “You are in a room where people are coming in spacesuits. When you are elderly, it’s harder as you are alone. Some of them cry. Some of them try to escape,” he said.
Dr Varon said the man in the picture was “doing much better”.
“We hope that before the end of the week, he will be able to get out of the hospital,” he said.