in texas using new technology to treat patients. also dr. andrew pavilla. you re at the operations center of a virtual icu at houston methodist. walk us through what a virtual icu is and how it s helping the hospital treat patients there. reporter: from the simple biggest goal, it is to put more doctors and nurses inside patient rooms without them having to physically be there and therefore get them in those rooms a little bit faster. so doctors and nurses can sit on this side of a screen, monitor patient information and literally communicate with teams that are at the bedside of a patient. this is a covid patient s hospital room right now. you can see the health care
faced. she never intended to hurt anyone. reporter: wright s family disappointed with the sentence. this lady got a slap on the wrist, and we still every night sitting around crying, waiting on my son to come home. reporter: under minnesota law, potter will only have to serve two-thirds of her sentence in prison, 16 months, which means she could be released almost exactly two years after duante wright s death. jericka. duncan: david schuman for us, thank you. tonight, the entire family of america s top doctor is fighting covid. surgeon general vivek murthy revealed his four-year-old daughter s diagnosis a few days ago. well, now, murthy, his wife, and five-year-old son have all tested positive. we turn now to the hidden toll of the two-year pandemic on exhausted health care workers. here s cbs kris van cleave. those are all covid patient
weren t patient rooms into patient rooms. they can have this as a patient room, a triage, even as treatment if they needed it because the domino effect is felt first often in the emergency room. here is what the head of the e.r. told me. we have a 40 bed emergency department. currently there are more than 20 people who need to get upstairs in the hospital taking our emergency department, so that takes our 40 bed emergency department to a 20 bed emergency department. reporter: and they also have eight patients in what are called behavioral health patients, people, for example, who may have been brought in from a nursing home and have dementia. they require extra care. that brings them down to 12 beds, and those are people who cannot then there s nowhere to transfer them elsewhere in the hospital. they hope this will take some of the pressure off. they were hoping to get some of the pressure off because unc health was opening a satellite hospital with 50 beds, acute
hospitals that are no longer to operate in the way that they previously were. when you are talking about here in houma, louisiana, a hospital, the major hospital that used to see about 100 individuals a day come into the er, they re not able to come into that facility because of the images that you can see in which the damage that they sustained. wind and rain shattering patient rooms windows. flooding the hallways were the patient, were. there were 120 patients that rode out the storm. they didn t have time to evacuate them ahead of the storm. i shouldn t say they didn t have time, they didn t have the capacity because of covid and the amount of saturation of hospitals in the surrounding areas with their capacity because of covid patients. what they did throughout that storm, unable to have power, able to care for patients, they had to find places including in nearby mississippi. i want you to look, this is what they popped up.
roof was breaking loose and broke into the patient rooms while we had patients and staff in there. water is pouring in from everywhere. as we re try to go mitigate some of that to make sure we re safe and our patients are safe, we just went through the night that way. in the morning we were able to assess the damage and we recognized that it pretty much blew holes in the four corners of our roof. reporter: this hospital, terrabonne, when you talk to the doctors and hospital administrators, it is hot out here, yet they re going to do what they need to do at a time in which covid is also special of concern. they had covid patients that had to be evacuated, but they said they ve had individuals coming up asking to be tested here in the heart of a pandemic, a hurricane that struck this community so hard. talk about a one-two-three-four-five punch. it seems never-ending. thank you so much.