p class=”css-axufdj evys1bk0″>Over the New Year’s holiday, the grown children of two immigrant families called 911 to report that their fathers were having difficulty breathing. The men, born in Mexico and living three miles from each other in the United States, both had diabetes and high blood pressure. They both worked low-wage, essential jobs — one a minibus driver, the other a cook. And they both hadn’t realized how sick they were.
Three weeks later, the men — Emilio Virgen, 63, and Gabriel Flores, 50 — both died from Covid-19. Their stories were hauntingly familiar at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles, by size the hardest-hit hospital in the hardest-hit county in California, the state now leading the nation in cases and on the brink of surpassing New York with the highest death toll.
In the intensive care unit on Jan. 21, Mr. Virgen became No. 207 on the hospital’s list of Covid-19 fatalities; Mr. Flores, just down the hall, became No. 208.
The New York Times spent more than a week inside the hospital, during a period when nearly a quarter of all Covid-19 patients there were dying, despite advances in knowledge of the disease. It was an outcome that approached that of some New York hospitals last spring, when the city was the epicenter of the pandemic.
"In the worst-hit part of California, a hospital struggled with a flood of cases." by BY SHERI FINK via NYT https://t.co/9myz2i4t7I pic.twitter.com/R3bHrRuM3r
— Jose Lopes (@BoscoJl65) February 8, 2021