U.S. Army veteran Daniel Wilkinson died because he couldn’t get an ICU bed needed to save his life.
Wilkinson was rushed to the hospital in Bellville, Texas, after he started feeling sick. An emergency physician at the Belville Medical Center diagnosed him with gallstone pancreatitis, a condition that could’ve been easily treated.
But the medical center wasn’t equipped to treat Wilkinson; due to a rise in severe COVID-19 patients in ICU beds all across the entire Southern region of the country, there wasn’t a spot available for Wilkinson at any nearby hospitals either.
Once doctors finally located an open spot for Wilkinson in a Houston area hospital, he was airlifted there, but it was too late to save him.
“They weren’t able to do the procedure on him because it had been too long,” Wilkinson’s mother told CBS News. “[They] told me that they had seen air pockets in his intestines, which means that they were already starting to die off. They told me that I had to make a decision, and I knew how Danny felt; he didn’t want to be that way. And, so, we were all in agreement that we had to let him go.”
