Texas deploys National Guard to El Paso to help pandemic-ravaged city deal with overflowing morgues

The state government of Texas is sending the National Guard to El Paso, the border town that has been ravaged by COVID-19 to the point where its morgues are overflowing with bodies.

The deployment comes as El Paso residents on Friday continued to receive self-administered COVID-19 tests that are being delivered via drones.

The automated drones deliver the testing kits at the doorsteps of customers who ordered them from Walmart.

The retailer is partnering with Quest Diagnostics and drone service provider DroneUp to deliver the kits to customers who do not have to risk contracting the virus by stepping out of their homes.

Earlier this year, Walmart piloted drone delivery of grocery and household products in Fayetteville, North Carolina, as it accelerated the expansion of its pickup and delivery services with virus-wary consumers preferring home delivery. 

The drones launched on Friday dropped COVID-19 self-collection kits on driveways, front sidewalks or backyards of homes within a one-and-a-half-mile radius of designated Walmart stores.

The COVID-19 at-home self-collection kits will be delivered to single-family homes at this time. 

Customers can then self-administer the nasal swab and send back samples to Quest Diagnostics for testing – although that would be by regular mail rather than drone.

‘We know that it will be some time before we see millions of packages delivered via drone. That still feels like a bit of science fiction,’ Tom Ward, a Walmart senior vice-president, said in a statement.    

‘Walmart has been serving the El Paso community throughout the pandemic with drive-thru testing sites and extended testing hours, and we wanted to provide another way to access testing that provides convenience and leverages technology while learning how drones could impact the delivery of healthcare in the future,’ said Amanda Jenkins, Walmart’s vice president of operation support and implementation. 

‘We are grateful to our Quest and DroneUp partners, and our pharmacists and associates, for their support in launching the pilot as we continue to work together during the pandemic.’ 

There is no delivery cost for patients who qualify to receive an at-home self-collection kit through the pilot program.

Meanwhile, the situation in El Paso, where prison inmates making $2 an hour are being used to store dead bodies in makeshift refrigeration morgues, has become dire.

‘After completing an assessment of the situation on the ground in El Paso County this week, the state has mobilized a team of 36 Texas National Guard personnel to provide mortuary affairs support beginning at 0900 tomorrow,’ read a statement from the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

The military’s help is being welcomed by the community.

‘As we’ve seen a rapid increase in cases and hospitalizations, we are unfortunately also seeing a spike in deaths,’ said El Paso Mayor Dee Margo.

‘We have been working closely with funeral homes and mortuaries to assist with increased capacity and coordination of resources.

‘The Texas Military will provide us with the critical personnel to carry out our fatality management plan and we are very grateful to them for their ongoing support.’

Officials in both the city and county governments secured a central morgue location to store more bodies as mortuaries, funeral homes, and state morgues fill up, according to KFOX 14 TV.

Texas surpassed 8,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients Friday for the first time since a deadly summer surge as doctors amplified pleas to keep Thanksgiving gatherings small.

The worsening surge of cases has El Paso County – where the pandemic is blamed for more than 300 deaths since October – now searching for prospective morgue workers.

County leaders are offering $27 an hour for work they describe as not only physically arduous but ’emotionally taxing as well.’

The job posting comes as El Paso is already paying jail inmates to move bodies and has 10 refrigerated trucks as morgues began to overflow.

Texas reported more than 11,700 new cases on Friday, the second-highest daily total of the pandemic.

More than 8,100 virus patients are hospitalized, the most since early August.

The Texas Hospital Association, the industry group representing more than 500 hospitals, issued a new appeal for families to keep holiday gatherings ‘very small’ as doctors and nurses struggle to keep up with rising caseloads.

‘They are tired and emotionally drained. They are worried about their own families,’ the organization said in a statement.

Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has ruled out another shutdown and accused local leaders of not enforcing restrictions already in place.

Despite the city being one of the nation’s coronavirus epicenters, it was still business as usual for residents.

El Paso has had 22,000 new cases in the past week alone, with more than 35,000 active Covid-19 cases – 79,162 in total – and 845 deaths since March. 

But despite the rise in cases, residents are going about their daily business with little panic about the virus. 

DailyMail.com spotted people out shopping at the local strip malls and dining out. Several restaurants are opened for dine-in eating and at the local Famous Dave’s has a huge sign that says, ‘Dine-In Now Open.’

In downtown El Paso, city workers were busy setting up Christmas decorations at the town square, while nearby business shop owners put their goods out on the sidewalk in an attempt to bring in customers. 

While wearing a mask is mandatory to enter into businesses, several residents were observed not wearing one when out in public. Even a local El Paso PD bicycle officer was spotted not wearing a mask while riding around the downtown area. 

Several cities in the country have reported ‘panic buying’, with frantic shoppers cleaning out stores of toilet paper, hand sanitizer and food. But that’s not the case in El Paso. The local Costco and Walmart had plenty of toilet paper, meat, hand sanitizer and more.

There weren’t mass lines in stores either, which has been the case in other cities.

One local El Pasoan Miguel Jimenez, 45, told DailyMail.com while out shopping that he wasn’t too worried about catching coronavirus, saying, ‘If we get the Covid we get it, it’s God’s will.’

A Covid-19 testing center at the University of Texas El Paso was nearly empty on Thursday, with only about 10 cars waiting to be tested, which pales in comparison with other Texas cities and across the country where the wait has been several hours.

Another free Covid-19 testing center in El Paso was completely empty, with no one in line waiting to be tested.  

The only true sign of the pandemic in the city is near the University Medical Center where there are several portable tents in the parking lot set up for potential Covid-19 patients. 

The southern Texas city that sits on the Rio Grande, bordering Juarez, Mexico, is one of the nation’s coronavirus epicenters.  

The state of Texas recently surpassed one million confirmed cases of the virus, with 19,000 dead.

The hospitals in the city are filled up with Covid-19 patients.

They account for more than half of all of the hospital admissions in El Paso and 1 in 6 Covid patients hospitalized in Texas are in El Paso.

Morgues are overrun with the dead.

Last week inmates from the local jail were photographed transporting dead Covid-19 patients in and out of refrigerated trucks at the county’s medical examiner’s office.

More than 132,700 new cases were announced across the United States on Friday, with more than 1,000 deaths reported for the fourth straight day. 

El Paso had 22 deaths. 

The city of El Paso jumped into the spotlight when a travel nurse went on Facebook Live on November 7 where she described the ‘horrific’ conditions at a local El Paso hospital.

Registered nurse Lawanna Rivers took to Facebook to describe her time at the University Medical Center in El Paso where she claims patients were taken to a room called The Pit and given just three rounds of CPR before being pronounced dead.

In her video posted to Facebook she said: ‘My first day at orientation, I was told that whatever patients go into the pit, they only come out in a body bag. I saw a lot of people die that I felt like shouldn’t have died.

‘This hospital’s policy was they only get three rounds of CPR which was only six minutes, this out of all the codes we had, there is not a single patient that made it.’

Rivers said she left her assignment in El Paso early because she couldn’t bear to watch more patients die.

‘I’ve seen so many deaths in this last month than I’ve seen in my entire 13-year career,’ Rivers said.

She said she was also afraid for her life and the kind of care she would receive if she got sick there.

I kept saying: ‘I can’t get sick here in Texas, because if I get COVID here in Texas … I’m going to die. It was that bad,’ she said.

University Medical Center spokesman, Ryan Mielke sent DailyMail.com the following statement in response to Rivers’ comments.

‘After watching the video, while we cannot fully verify the events expressed, we empathize and sympathize with the difficult, physical, and emotional toll that this pandemic takes on thousands of healthcare workers here and throughout our country. This particular travel nurse was at UMC briefly to help El Paso confront the surge of COVID-19 patients.’

In the aim of stopping the spread of the COVID-19 the city of El Paso placed 19 mobile hand-washing stations throughout the downtown area.

Officials worry that the spread of the virus is going to get worse before it gets better and are particularly worried about the upcoming holiday period and have asked residents to limit the number of people at their family gatherings.

Source: Daily Mail