When the so-called “COVID tsunami” hits Hidalgo County, Texas, Juan Lopez, 45, goes from death to death in his black Cadillac Escalade.
Elite Transportation and Cleanup owner Lopez has the contract with the county, police and various funeral homes for the dead. He’s spent the last 14 years dealing with deaths of all sorts, apparently, “suicides, homicides, everything.” Most are now the result of COVID-19.
When the county reports that 150 other people have succumbed to the virus, it’s also the number of bodies Lopez transported. Increasingly, patients die suddenly in their homes. Lopez then arrives at the door in a mask and a white Tyvek suit.
“They look at me like, ‘Why are you dressed like this?'” he told the Daily Beast. “Everyone gets dressed and I look like an astronaut.”
He explains his presence and gives his condolences through his mask to the entire circle of relatives who are there.
“I just brought in: “My call is Juan Lopez. I paintings for the county. I’m here to get your enjoy back. I’m sorry for your loss, ” he said. You have to treat other people with respect because they just lost someone. You have to treat other people with compassion. You can’t just walk in and say, “I’m going for the body.” »»
Lopez seeks to comfort the daughter of a man who died in the house on Friday when he told her that his mother had died of COVID-19 at a local hospital the day before. Lopez learned that he had already transported the girl’s other relative.
The girl, who gave the impression of being in her twenties, told Lopez that her father had asked for a loan to pay for her mother’s funeral. The father waiting for approval when he suddenly died himself.
“She said to me, “We had just won for my mother’s funeral and now we don’t have for my father,” Lopez recalls.
She had done a blood test for the antibodies and it had been negative. But those controls are very wrong and she knew if she had also been infected.
Lopez took each and every one of the precautions imaginable so as not to catch at the beginning of a ritual with which he practiced too much. He wrapped the father in a white sheet and placed it in a framed bag. The big challenge was to put the frame on the gurney, however, it was relatively simple to roll it towards the Escalade. He then transported the father as he did with the mother and 37 other COVID patients during this two-day period.
Previous victims in the week included a couple who had been mortally inflamed with what a county fitness officer described only as “their son.” The county counted 113 “groups” where other people swelled up through other members of their own family.
So that his own circle of relatives does not sign up for this list, Lopez, upon arrival at the house, has a regime that begins by undressing in the garage. Stay in the shower for at least 10 minutes.
“A lot of soap, ” he noted.
In new clothing, you can sign up for your 4 children, a 26-year-old daughter, a 7-year-old son, and 5-year-old twins. They are explaining why you do homework in the first place, earning enough collection through gathering to drain and feed them, and give them everything they need.
“They’re my life,” he said. “My kids are my life. My kids, they deserve everything.”
It’s just a phone call from the next job, necessarily keeping the same hours as death.
“I’m 24/7,” he says.
Take everything you can sleep, two or maybe 4 hours if you’re lucky, and are back at work, driving frame by frame throughout the county, up to 22 hours a day. He thinks it could be more in the next few days. You will have a frame on your back and you will see other people still driving without a mask and ignoring social distances.
“People are stubborn,” he says. “They don’t care.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, I had heard others say that the danger was exaggerated, that doctors were simply hunting to make money.
“I said, “No, other people are dying,” he recalls.
Too many other people have remained in denial, still unwilling to do what we all want to do with the virus. Never think that up to 1,224 other people in Hidalgo County, which includes the border with the city of McAllen, had tested positive on a single day, which is consistent with the infection rate per person particularly consistent with existing day records for Texas and even Florida. Texas’ early opening has redesigned Hidalgo County from a COVID-19 containment style to an epicenter of infection and death. Even the county’s leading public fitness physician tested positive last June.
Lopez works alone, however, you can count on all the police officers to help him put the frame on the gurney. The result is camaraderie, a type of physical link.
So Lopez shuddered Saturday in the middle of his last task when he learned that two McAllen police officers had been killed. A domestic violence suspect ambushed them and then killed himself.
The surprise turned to pain when a phone call informed Lopez that he would collect the bodies of police officer Edelmiro Garza and police officer Ismael Chavez at the hospital.
“I broke the center when they told me the names,” she recalls. “They were friends of mine.
Lopez had gone to high school with Garza and was friends with the two men. The two had helped him with the COVID-19 sufferers and had last noticed them a few days earlier. Other cops who had joined him in the dead zone now called him.
“All me, ” Juan, where are you, John? Juan, hurry up, hurry up! “Remember.
Lopez finished removing a coronavirus victim from his home as temporarily as decency allowed and went to the hospital. A procession of more than 50 police cars escorted the killed officers while Lopez transported them on the hospital’s Escalade to the county morgue.
He was then given the task of transporting the shooter’s body.
“I’m a little angry because they were my friends, ” said Lopez.
After four hours of sleep, he returned to the streets on Sunday, collecting more victims of the virus. I had another one to pick up on Monday morning.
“I have 3 more to wait for,” he said. “And it’s only 10 in the morning.”
Lopez had a companion, Elizandro Flores, with him and they had carried five bodies until Monday afternoon.
At this point, Hidalgo County statistics were not yet available, but the county trial of Richard Cortez told the Daily Beast that he hoped his size would be daunting. He said Sunday’s checks were confusing because Hidalgo was also a hot spot in the maximum literal sense of the word. A thermometer at the outdoor verification site recorded the ground temperature at 141 degrees.
At a press conference, Cortez did what all elected officials do on the occasion of a pandemic: he referred to genuine medical authority. The county’s top public health care physician, Dr. Ivan Melendez, took the podium. He tested positive himself in June. His personal patients come with the partner who died after swollen through his son. Melendez has now noticed to the press that the percentage of positive verification effects has increased in recent days from 5% to 8% to 13%.
“If we had to make a social estrangement, if we were to follow the instructions, we would not see a continuous accumulation in the percentage of positive cases,” Melendez said. “My opinion is that other people don’t pay attention. Even if my opinion doesn’t make sense, the numbers don’t lie.”
As the night approached, Lopez won a call informing him that there would be a procession from the hospital to the morgue. It is said to be the framework of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
“COVID,” Lopez says.
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