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Joseph Varon, a physician treating coronavirus patients at a Texas hospital, was working on his 252nd consecutive day when he spotted an upset elderly man in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU).
Varon’s comforting embrace of the white-haired man on Thanksgiving was captured by a photographer for Getty Images and went viral around the world.
Varon, chief of staff at the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, told CNN that he was entering the COVID ICU when he saw the elderly patient “get out of bed and try to get out of the room.”
“And he’s crying,” Varon said. “So I go up to him and (ask) him: ‘Why are you crying?'”
“And the man says,” I want to be with my wife. “So I take it and keep it,” Varon said. “I was very sorry for him. I felt very sad, just like him.”
“He eventually felt better and stopped crying,” Varon told CNN on Monday, which he said was his 256th consecutive day on the job.
“I don’t know why I didn’t break,” the doctor said. “My nurses cry in the middle of the day.”
Varon said isolating the COVID unit has been difficult for many patients, especially the elderly.
“You can imagine,” he said. “You are in a room where people in spacesuits arrive.
Also Read: Indonesian Scientists Win Scholarships For COVID-19 Innovations
“When you are an elderly individual, it is more difficult because you are alone,” he said.
“Some of them cry. Some of them try to escape,” he said. “We actually had someone who tried to escape from a window the other day.”
Varon said the older man in the photo “is much better off”.
“We hope that before the end of the week he can get out of the hospital,” he said.
Varon also had a message for people not taking precautions during the pandemic.
“People are out there in bars, restaurants, shopping malls,” the doctor said. “It’s crazy. People don’t listen and then they end up in my ICU.
“What people need to know is that I don’t want to have to hug them.
“They have to do the basic things: keep social distances, wear masks, wash their hands and avoid going to places where there are a lot of people,” he said. “If people did, health care workers like me could hopefully rest.”
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