McAllen, Texas, Grapples With Covid-19 Pandemic

Nurse Taylor Olson, 26, from Naples, Florida, holds a phone up to the ear of a dying patient as the patient's daughter is at the other end of the line as the elderly woman slowly passes away in the extension of the Intensive Care Unit of the Serious Infectious Disease Unit--built in a former warehouse of a hospice--at the Doctors Hospital at Renaissance in Edinburg Texas, July 8, 2020. Because loved ones are not permitted to visit wards dedicated to COVID-19 patients--both for their own safety as much as for the safety of the patients and staff-- Olson had promised the woman's daughter she would hold the phone to her mother's ear for as long as she could, and hold her mother's hand, and be by the woman's side during her death. The pandemic has reached the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, one of the poorest and most medically vulnerable populations in the country, where the demographics map onto the risk factors identified by the Center for Disease Control for COVID-19. The virus is ripping through this community on a straight up trajectory. The hospitals are completely full, and there is nowhere for the sick patients to go, and no one to care for them. The RGV is the most uninsured region of the valley. (Photo by Lynsey Addario/Getty Images Reportage)