El Paso, Texas, has received its fourth portable refrigerated morgue to store the bodies of Covid-19 victims.
“It is a stark reality for a city where coronavirus patients have been succumbing to COVID-19 at a rate faster than medical personnel can investigate their cases,” reports NPR. This forces them to preserve the dead until they can be examined.
A local judge issued a shut-down order for El Paso County, but Texas state officials are suing to have it lifted.
El Paso and its surrounding region have become one of the hottest Covid hot spots, in both the U.S. and across the Rio Grande River in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, an area nicknamed the Borderplex.
The number killed there by the pandemic so far is fast approaching 2,000.
Metropolitan El Paso and Juárez, along with a 50-mile stretch of southern New Mexico, have a total population of about 3 million; more than 17,000 coronavirus cases have been reported there in the last two weeks alone, and in El Paso, a record 1,643 on Saturday.
As of Monday morning, El Paso County’s official Covid death toll was 605. There have also been 1,274 deaths in Juárez, and 82 in New Mexico’s Doña Ana County, according to the El Paso Times.
For the region, that totals 1,961.
Nearly 1,000 are hospitalized in El Paso County, more than one-third of them in intensive care.
Seeking to slow the outbreak, a county judge issued an order late Friday closing gyms, salons, gyms, tattoo parlors and preventing in-person dining at restaurants.
But the state wants to keep everything open.
“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined several El Paso-area businesses in filing a lawsuit” seeking to block that order, NPR reports.
