Survivor details horror at Linden’s COVID Hospital

Renee James had a front seat view of physical conditions at the Wismar Hospital which houses
COVID-19 patients. She was once one of them.
She survived the highly contagious and deadly virus, but the conditions she and other COVID-19
patients were forced to endure are forever carved on the front of her mind.
Ever so often, something touches the replay button and she relives the horror, over and over!
"It was really difficult going to the toilet and bathroom. The toilet was overflowing and it
was a terrible sight. The scent was unbearable,” Ms. James recalled.
She continued: “This is certainly not the kind of environment that persons who are sick
should be in, especially if they are affected by COVID because it adds to the mental and
psychological distress that they are under," she observed.
The Lindener is still appalled at the physical environment the sick had to weather if they didn’t
first succumb to the deadly virus discovered in Wuhan, China late 2019 and said this must
change.
“I have no fear of being victimised. The toilet facility was so bad it was overflowing with
faeces and the bathroom was really clogged up and people had to be standing in that dirty
bathroom to bathe,” she remembered.
Ms. James also put the spotlight on some nurses’ attitude to their defenseless patients in the
facility struggling to survive.
“They had this elderly woman for some days lying there without even cleaning her. She was
just left there (unattended). Somebody apparently told the doctors that I had posted on
Facebook about the condition there and about the elderly woman. Several nurses were
angry and upset with me, but I never did,” she maintained.

Nevertheless, aware that secrets at the facility was now in the public domain, “helped in
changing the nurses’ actions towards the elderly woman,” James, a mother of one, said.
She said it was clear that several of those healthcare workers at the COVID facility were
unhappy being there and shunned the patients, especially at nights.
“You are left to the mercies of God as the nurses do not check on you, and if you have an
emergency, you have to call them from your phone,” James disclosed.
James is appealing to residents of the bauxite-mining town to remember that COVID is a life-
threatening virus. As a patient, she was realised "…how dangerous this thing is and its impact
when you are forced to look death in the eye."
Unlike many in the Upper Demerara/Berbice (Region Ten) municipality, she was "very strict
and cautious but unfortunately, still contracted the disease.”
James, her mother and father contracted COVID and were all patients at some time at the
facility.
“I can assure you, that with my experience, I am10 times more cautious. When you are in
the COVID hospital, all you're thinking is if you would make it,” she recalled with a
plaintive sigh.
She and her mother overcame the virus.
They buried the father and husband.