Los Angeles medics faced with death on daily basis

Los Angeles – Deep within a South Los Angeles hospital, a row of elderly Hispanic men lay hooked up to ventilators – their bodies resting in induced comas – while nurses clad in spacesuit-style respirators checked their patients’ bleeping monitors in the otherwise eerie silence.

The intensive care unit (ICU) in one of the city’s poorest districts is well-accustomed to death, but with Los Angeles now at the heart of the United States’ Covid-19 pandemic, medics say they have never seen anything on this scale.

“It’s hard. We’re human, and we’re trying our best,” said nurse Vanessa Arias. “But we’ve seen so much death during the past few weeks.”

Barely moments earlier, she had informed another tearful family that their mother had just passed.

“We’re in the midst of the eye of the storm,” she said.

Martin Luther King Jnr Community Hospital, sandwiched between the neighbourhoods of Watts and Compton, is stretched far beyond capacity by an unrelenting influx of coronavirus patients.

It had converted a chapel and gift shop into overflow and examination rooms, created new makeshift ICU beds in the post-surgery ward and built field hospital tents outside its entrance.

The 131-bed hospital had 215 patients, the majority with Covid. National Guard medics had just arrived to ease the strain on overwhelmed doctors and nurses.

“If Los Angeles is the epicentre of the world, this community is the epicentre of Covid in Los Angeles,” said hospital chief executive Elaine Batchlor.

Surrounding neighbourhoods are overwhelmingly Hispanic and black – two demographics hit hardest by the virus.

At the MLK hospital, many of the patients are essential workers, highly exposed at jobs in grocery stores and public transport and living in crowded homes where isolating is impossible.

Even before Covid, the community suffered from epidemic levels of preventable and chronic disease, including diabetes, obesity, heart disease and sepsis.

“We’re seeing whole families, groups of them, getting sick at the same time,” said Arias. –