A veteran of the Afghanistan War succumbed to a treatable illness due to a lack of intensive care unit (ICU) beds in Texas amid the ongoing surge in COVID cases across the United States. US Army veteran Daniel Wilkinson went to a hospital in Bellville, Texas, last week after he started feeling sick. Wilkinson was diagnosed with gallstone pancreatitis, a treatable disease that needed advanced care. 

“I do labs on him, I get labs, and the labs come back, and I’m at the computer, and I have one of those ‘Oh, crap’ moments. If that stone doesn’t spontaneously come out and doesn’t resolve itself, that fluid just builds up, backs up into the liver, backs up into the pancreas, and starts to shut down those organs. His bloodwork even showed that his kidneys were shutting down,” Dr. Hasan Kakli, an emergency physician at Belville Medical Center, told CBS. 

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The hospital wasn’t equipped to treat him and he needed to be transferred to another hospital to have the procedure to remove the stone. However, with the coronavirus filling up ICU beds across the state, he couldn’t be saved. 

“I’ve never lost a patient from this diagnosis, ever. I’m scared that the next patient that I see is someone that I can’t get to where they need to get to go. We are playing musical chairs, with 100 people and 10 chairs. When the music stops, what happens? People from all over the world come to Houston to get medical care and, right now, Houston can’t take care of patients from the next town over. That’s the reality,” Kalki told the outlet.

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Wilkinson’s mother took to Facebook to share the news of his son’s death. 

“Danny went peacefully with no pain. If he was able to recover he would be a vegetable and he did not want that. After all he went through in Afghanistan a little gall stone took him out. He loved each and every one of you,” his mother, Michelle Puget, wrote. 

COVID-19 has ravaged the southern US states of Florida, South Carolina, Texas and Louisiana. A total of 84,852 fresh COVID cases were recorded in the US on Saturday, out of which10,568 were from Texas.