EL PASO — Determined to move forward after a courtroom defeat for his stay-at-home order, the county judge here has joined with health care officials to rally public support for a temporary end to nonessential business even as coronavirus deaths in the city topped 769 and bodies began to pile up in mobile morgues.
At least one top health official said hospitals are already rationing care. And County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said inmates are helping move bodies to the refrigerated trucks that serve as morgues.
“They’re in desperate mode,” said Samaniego, adding that the use of the inmates is a last resort. He said he hopes the Texas National Guard can soon assist. “So, we’ve got the inmates, I mean, that sort of paints a picture of how, how difficult it is,” he said. “We don’t have hands on deck anymore.”
On Monday, the El Paso Department of Public Health reported seven new coronavirus-related deaths and 1,550 new cases, bringing the number of fatalities to 769. Nearly 400 additional deaths are under investigation.
Hospitalizations increased to 1,111, while the number of ICU patients decreased from 319 to 300. The number of hospitalized coronavirus patients has increased nearly tenfold since the start of September.
How close is El Paso from becoming another Spain, or Italy, countries where physicians were put in the excruciating position of having to choose between who lives and who dies?
“I think we’re there,” said Dr. Emilio Gonzalez Ayala, a leading pulmonary disease and critical care specialist affiliated with Dallas-based Tenet Hospitals. “We’re already flying people from E.R.s in El Paso to hospitals elsewhere in Texas, because we don’t have the ability to keep them in our E.R.”
Samaniego spent the weekend visiting hospitals and talking to business owners, hoping to find the right balance between lives and livelihoods as the city grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic and the deaths and economic damage it is causing.
His Sunday comments came just days after a state appeals court blocked his shutdown of nonessential businesses in an effort to slow the outbreak of COVID-19. A group of local restaurants and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued to block his order.
Samaniego bristled at being called a tyrant in a tweet by Paxton, who wrote he would not “let rogue political subdivisions try to kill small business and holiday gatherings through unlawful executive orders.”
The county judge offered a scathing rebuttal: “If he walked around where there are 150, 145 bodies inside of trailers and families on the parking lot crying because that’s the closest they can get to their loved ones, then tell me that I’m a tyrant. I dare him and I want him to be in the middle of that situation. See, hear those people crying on the floor at the parking lot over at the medical examiner’s and then tell me I’m a tyrant. It’s very, very frustrating.”
Samaniego and leading physicians warn that the overwhelmed health care system is on the verge of imploding. Earlier this month, the Department of Defense sent medical teams and supplies to help and local funeral homes are readying extra refrigerated storage space.
“I know the trajectory. If you throw a ball, you know where it’s going to land. The trajectory is horrible,” Samaniego said, warning the incoming holidays will worsen the situation. “Most patients in my opinion might survive if our system was not as jammed as it is right now.”
Dr. Gonzalez Ayala warned that allowing restaurants to operate, even at 50 percent capacity, and allowing other nonessential businesses to continue operating “will be at the expense of the health and lives of all of us, and continue to overrun the resources that we have already maxed out. We don’t have the capacity anymore.”
He added that conditions across the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, are even more bleak. Finding hospital beds has become so difficult that fist fights between patients and nurses have ensued, he said he’s been told by colleagues there. He estimates that dozens of U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents are crossing the international bridges in ambulances paid for by the patients to get into U.S. hospitals.
“It’s just tragic,” he said, adding that they are “the poor, middle-class, to the rich and famous.”
Dr. Edward Michelson, chief of emergency medicine at the University Medical Center and a professor at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, said, “I do see an end (to the crisis) but I don’t know when it’s coming. Even in a marathon, you know ... you have to have time to drink some water, get some nutrition. Here, the hospitals are simply reaching their capacity.”
Michelson said the city and county, with help from the state government, “have done an amazing job in adding capacity” over the past eight weeks, adding up to “600 new hospital beds.”
“That’s like building two brand-new hospitals,” he said. “So all the hospitals have found ways to convert space to make into treatment areas. We have over 1,500 health care providers and support folks in the community from other parts of Texas and other parts of the country … But it’s not limitless.”
He added that Samaniego’s attempt to shut down nonessential business was sensitive but necessary.
“Judge Samaniego, I think, did the right thing, and it was a hard decision because of the political ramification, but he was legitimately concerned about the hospitals exceeding their capacity to take care of patients and he was right,” Michelson said. “But how do you balance the hardship of people’s loss of income vs. loss of life? I don’t, I don’t claim to have the answer to that.”
Samaniego made his hospital visits alongside Jacob Cintron, Chief Executive officer of the University Medical Center. Both recorded a public service announcement to express their gratitude to healthcare providers. Cintron, who grew up just blocks from the hospital, talked about his looming fears.
“We don’t want to fail our city,” he said. “We want to be able to provide the best care possible. And our biggest fear is that we’ve reached a point where we can’t help you anymore, either because you’re so ill and that there is no treatment left for you, or that there’s so many that we’re unable to provide the care needed for our community. That’s my biggest worry.”
Both men stared into a parking lot with a view into mobile morgues. Samaniego said sobbing family members and friends gather daily in the parking garage, overlooking the refrigerated trucks holding the remains of their loved ones. “Beloved souls,” he called them.
“You can hear their cries,” Samaniego said quietly.
Monday night, health care providers will hold a car caravan honk-a-thon in downtown El Paso to show support for the stay-home order, announced the National Nurses Organizing Committee.
