Las Vegas closes its shelters and puts the 'homeless' to sleep on the ground in a parking lot for the coronavirus

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The United States has approximately 550,000 'homeless' , or 0.17% of the population. In Las Vegas , some 7,000 live in huge underground tunnels built so that water from desert storms drains out of the city without causing flooding. At the entrance to one of the smallest tunnels, measuring around one kilometer, the authorities have created a center for those people affected by the coronavirus in a parking lot . Each 'homeless' has a parking space, duly separated from the other by at least six feet (1.80 meters), which is the recommended distance in the USA to avoid contagion.

The people who are in the parking lot, sleeping on the concrete outdoors, do not live in the tunnels, but in shelters. Last week, one of the residents in a shelter of the NGO Caridad Católica tested positive for the Covid-19 and the 500 'homeless' went to the streets. It was then when the authorities decided to enable parking, which, instead of cars, has people .

The reception services do not have mattresses for everyone, so many of those affected are sleeping on the asphalt, covered with blankets. At this time of year, Las Vegas is not a warm place . This Tuesday at 3 a.m. local time, the temperature was 12 degrees, and on Monday afternoon it reached 19.

The situation of the Las Vegas bums exemplifies the problems of all countries in dealing with the Covid-19. In this sense, the US is far from being the exception. The Bloomberg news agency reported Tuesday that US hospitals are firing doctors and nurses who speak to the media about the lack of material and equipment to combat the disease.

According to the Bloomberg news agency, a doctor has been fired from a hospital in Seattle , in Washington state, for giving an interview to a local media detailing the lack of preparation of the center. In Chicago, things have gone further, as a nurse has been put out on the street after emailing a number of colleagues saying they wanted safer suits and better insulation.

New York University Hospital (NYU) has announced to its staff that anything that talks to the media without authorization will be fired. Meanwhile, the United States has overtaken China in the number of victims of Covid-19, with 3,416 deaths , only behind Italy and Spain. Today, more than 500 people are dying a day from the disease. Next week, it could be 2,000, or four times as many, according to White House medical advisers.

Precisely the sanctions on doctors who exposed the existence of the coronavirus when the Chinese Government were one of the reasons that the pandemic spread in the Asian country, first, and then spread to the rest of the world. In December, a Chinese doctor who posted information about what was then an unknown illness on the Internet chat was forced to recant by the authorities . Subsequently, the doctor contracted Covid-19 and died. This and other anecdotes cause many to question the veracity of Chinese statistics.

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