Now there are three.
He still doesn’t have it.
At the time, ICU nurse Tanna Ingraham herself fought the disease after getting it from a patient, she thinks.
She recovered, but then got it again. “It’s like hell and back,” she says about 2020.
“The next six weeks will be the darkest weeks in modern American medical history,” Varon said. “We’re right at Christmas, where people don’t listen.”
Cases are exploding all over Texas. The seven-day average of positive cases is at an all-time high – averaging over 16,000 new cases daily, according to Johns Hopkins University. This average has increased by 15% compared to last week.
Lone Star State is reeling
About 40% of Covid-19 patients in the hospital are from other parts of the state reeling from the pandemic.
Walter Cuellar was transferred from West Texas some 500 miles away. He thinks he and his wife picked up the virus at the supermarket. She had mild symptoms. Today he is recovering, but when he arrived he was almost put on a ventilator.
“Where I live there are a lot of people where they don’t wear the mask,” he says. “I often go to the store with my wife and she and I were the only ones wearing masks and other people didn’t wear masks at all.”
Bri Smith works with foreign exchange students and recently moved to Columbus, about 73 miles west of Houston. The wife and mother of three also think she contracted the virus while shopping.
“It’s the worst I’ve ever felt in my life,” says Smith. “The aches and pains.”
Varon says patients are now coming in sicker after waiting longer to seek medical care.
“Our average patient spent about 20 days with symptoms before they came to us,” he says. In recent months, the hospital has used a variety of drugs to treat the disease.
Richard Gonzales thought he could stand it, so he resisted going to the hospital for a week. He has two jobs, has a wife and five children and is not sure how he got the virus.
‘I kind of messed up because those symptoms that I got, when I got it, I should have gone straight to the hospital or the emergency room, but I didn’t. I was in bed thinking it would disappear. ‘
‘It’s as if we have forgotten’
Frustrations continue to grow for Varon and the staff.
“Even if I give them holy water, it becomes difficult for them to get better,” says Varon.
Varon – who has been dubbed the “Covid fighter” and has a car license plate saying the same thing – was the first to receive the Moderna vaccine on Monday to assure staff and the largely minority community that the vaccine is safe.
Dr John Okereke, director of emergency services, was also vaccinated. He is black and says it is critical that minorities seek treatment and take the vaccine when it is available.
Okereke says the doctors are “ecstatic” about the vaccinations.
“When you watch TV, you don’t really know what the doctors are going through,” he says. ‘You have no idea what we’re going through. Sometimes we are really afraid of contracting the disease. ‘
The vaccines couldn’t have come at a better time. According to the COVID Tracking Project, hospital admissions in the state have continued to rise, with 10,000 patients as of Monday, a level not seen since July.
According to Johns Hopkins, Texas has recorded 113,049 new Covid-19 cases in the past seven days. This is the second highest state total, after California.
Ingraham, the nurse, says she is stressed by the ongoing battle with the disease, and has a report on the toll it has taken on her and others in the hospital.
“It’s as if we don’t exist,” she says. ‘You realize that we are still here taking care of these people who are endangering my life, the life of my child, the life of my mother.
“I feel like we have literally been forgotten.”
CNN’s Haley Brink contributed to this report.