the overflow morgue at my local hospital

[mellowtigger]

The current crisis also hits "close to home" for me.  A few years ago, I attended the local community session regarding the Minnesota lawsuit settlement with Northern Metals Recycling.  It was a horrible settlement.  The state proved that the company was polluting, they proved that local residents were suffering asthma hospitalization and lead exposure at rates higher than anywhere else in the state, and what was their punishment?  The company was allowed to continue operating for 2 more years!  It was apparently important to government officials that the company could conveniently migrate operations to a new location on their own schedule.  (Where they promptly lit up the sky in a pungent fire that burned for days.)  It didn't matter that local residents suffered poor health for the benefit of the corporation.

The state reneged its responsibility to value citizens over corporations, so residents in my part of the city now have long term health problems due to many years of inhaling airborn pollutants like lead.  Then along comes a brand new coronavirus that ravages the lungs.

The hospital nearest to me is North Memorial.  Our Minneapolis story doesn't make headlines like the situation in New York City, but we are leveling off at a condition nearing worrisome.

"At North Memorial, we have four ICUs and they're anywhere from 13-16 beds apiece. A couple of weeks ago we were getting them one at a time and now our floor is full, and it's staying full," Turner explained. "As we move people out – and we are moving people out, people are getting better – there's more to take those beds.  Slowly, every couple days going up 10 more people. I really have this gut feeling that it's going to all of a sudden start to snowball," she added, saying she worked earlier this week and saw patients on ventilators who first arrived at the hospital in need of intubation three or four weeks ago. "I mean I worked 3-4 weeks ago and I came back this last weekend and the same people were there. That's how long they're staying on the ventilator. They're blocking up the ICUs for such a long period of time, so it's going to start snowballing faster and faster."
- https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/twin-cities-icu-nurse-you-need-to-know-just-how-real-this-is

If you look at the county numbers for COVID-19, my Hennepin county currently has 1,073 cases with 113 deaths.  The 2nd highest total is Ramsey county with 219 cases and 11 deaths.  We have 10X the nearest total of deaths in the state.  I saw on a forum where someone claimed to be a nurse working at North Memorial, and she explained that the morgue has space for only 3 bodies, so they now have an overflow morgue outside the hospital.  It serves as temporary space until local mortuaries can pick up the corpses.

It's there.  I walked from my house this morning to the hospital and took this photo.  It's a refrigerated trailer blocking what would normally be the sidewalk behind the hospital.  I blame my local government for this problem.  They brushed off environmental pollution, and now locals will die from that insult to their health.

Healthy ecosystems matter.  For both the short term and the long term.  Environmental justice is a real thing.  Failure costs lives.  Pollution is bad.  Why are we still debating these points?

It should be obvious, but here we are today with an overflow morgue at my hospital, near the "bad part of town" that's been ignored for so long.

Comments

[foeclan]

Hennepin and Ramsey are the two highest-population counties in the state (Hennepin is first by a wide margin), so it stands to reason they'd have the highest rates. Not disagreeing with the other points, mind you, just putting those two statistics in context.

[mellowtigger]

Agree. And the nurse said that trailer was "scarcely used" (but still used). And Hennepin covers zip codes that were probably upwind of the air pollution that had people in hospitals earlier. But I really would expect Hennepin and Ramsey to have roughly equivalent covid tolls (although hennepin has 2X the population), but there's a huge disparity there. I am very curious to know the population percentages by county for who can work from home and who still has to go in to work. And rider numbers for public transportation in each county in March. There are a lot of considerations in play for a viral outbreak, but... overflow morgue? And only at the hospital here?

The state appears to be updating data frequently. The link to the county data now shows:
Hennepin 1,132 123
Ramsey 235 14

[mellowtigger]

“So when we talk about who's most likely to be the most vulnerable, you can actually predict where the deaths are going to be,” Bullard said.

City by city and state by state, the disparities are glaring. In New York City, blacks are dying from COVID-19 at twice the rate of their white counterparts. In Chicago, African Americans make up just 30 percent of the population but 70 percent of the deaths from the disease. In Wisconsin, they represent 6 percent of the population, but nearly 40 percent of those fatalities. In nearby Michigan, it’s 14 percent of the population and 40 percent of known coronavirus deaths.

Black Louisianans in Lavigne’s region have been hit especially hard by the pandemic. African Americans represent 56 percent of the state’s COVID-19 deaths — much more than the 32 percent of the population they represent.

“It's not random. It's not isolated. It's not coincidental. The singular root is racism and the continued operation of disparities based on race and based on place,” Bullard said. “Air pollution and pollution in general is segregated, and so is America.”

- https://www.nbcnews.com/podcast/into-america/first-pollution-now-coronavirus-black-parish-louisiana-deals-double-whammy-n1189951

[foeclan]

There's an article in the Strib today about this very question.

https://www.startribune.com/why-does-hennepin-county-have-so-many-more-covid-19-fatalities-than-ramsey/570047761/

[mellowtigger]

Thanks for the link. That's a good find. I'm registering at the strib now, so I can add a comment.

[mellowtigger]

New York Times sees a similar issue in the UK. It doesn't identify any environmental justice issue there, but it does raise the difference between increased rate-of-infection and increased rate-of-death.

“The underlying health and social disparities that drive inequality in health and life expectancy have been there all along, and this virus has just laid them bare,” said Dr. Riyaz Patel, an associate professor of cardiology at University College London. “This pandemic has not been the great leveler. It’s been the great magnifier, as it were.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/world/europe/coronavirus-uk-black-britons.html