Dr. Taison Bell, the director of the medical intensive care unit at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, was doing rounds in the COVID-19 ICU, caring for about 20 patients, when he noticed that his unit was full almost entirely of Black and Latinx people, despite the fact that Charlottesville is 70% white.
Bell, who grew up just an hour away from the hospital, says he “just couldn’t escape the thought of this virus disproportionately killing people in my community.”
As he tells NPR’s Michel Martin on All Things Considered, he had to pause rounds and “acknowledge how tough emotionally it was for me just to see what we were seeing.”
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