“Even with a lot of oxygen … they just die.” Orange County Nurse Describes Heartbreaking Scenes from Coronavirus Unit

ORANGE, California (KABC) – Many local hospitals are running out of ICU beds for the sickest COVID-19 patients.

The biggest fear is that after a boom in cases of Christmas and New Year’s gatherings, hospitals will have to start rationing, which means they only treat people who have the best chance of surviving.

MORE: Hospitals are faced with a choice: who gets care, who gets turned away?

Yet every day hundreds of people in the state die from the virus.

Nurses in the St. Joseph Hospital in the city of Orange says it is heartbreaking to see it first hand.

“They fight every day and struggle to breathe every day, even with a lot of oxygen. And then you just see them die. They just die. And they fight dead. It’s so sad,” said Caroline Brandenburger, a nurse at COVID, described.

The state has deployed nearly 90 cool trailers, up from a few weeks ago, 60 for use as temporary mortuaries.

Orange County reported another 29 COVID-19 deaths on Monday, along with 3,259 new cases of coronavirus. The province has 2,221 patients who have been hospitalized with coronavirus, including 544 in intensive care.

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