As the United States leads the world in both reported COVID-19 cases and death toll, hospitals at other coronavirus hot spots around the country are reporting dire conditions as they deal with a surge in critically sick patients. “We have to ask ourselves why, in a country that spends so much money on healthcare, are we still having problems producing the most basic equipment, [such as masks, gowns and tests],” says Democracy Now! co-host, Juan González, who describes how he struggled to get his own 92-year-old mother tested when he took her to the emergency room in New Jersey. “It is just an outrage that this discontinues to bedevil a country as wealthy as ours. And I really believe it’s part of this whole situation of this neoliberal view of how to run the market.”
But this has now hit directly home in the last week or so. First, my 92-year-old mother got sick last week. Her caregiver in New York City, where she lived, was felled and had a high fever and had to quarantine, and therefore she was left alone. My wife and I had to, clearly, go to the Bronx, get her and bring her here to New Brunswick, because she had no one else to care for her. And she had no fever, though, but she had intense abdominal pains. And we tried to see if we could deal with her and treat her here for several days, ended up having to go to the emergency room Sunday. She was hospitalized. Only when they hospitalized her and they did a COVID test did she turn out to be positive. So she is now in the hospital dealing with the COVID.
And meanwhile, here, then, yesterday, my wife came down sick, and now she is extremely weak. And again, she does not have fever, either, but it’s clear that something has affected her, even as we were trying to deal with my mother. And so, it’s become much more direct here, not just reporting on it, but trying to deal with it. And, of course,
— source democracynow.org | Apr 14, 2020