(CNN)Dr. Cleavon Gilman served in the Iraq War, but he said that doesn’t compare to the battle he’s fighting as an emergency room physician in Arizona.
“This pandemic is a lot worse than being in Iraq just because when you’re in a war zone, you can leave that war zone. You can fly out of Iraq; you’re OK here in the United States,” the Yuma doctor said.
“With this pandemic, you cannot fly anywhere … the war is being waged everywhere.”
Now Gilman and other health care workers are pleading for more public safety rules — such as mask mandates or stay-at-home orders — to prevent hospitals from bursting past capacity.
“You can’t overwhelm a hospital and expect that care is not going to be compromised as a result,” Gilman said.
Across the US, the numbers of daily Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths just reached all-time highs.