'So much death': LA hospital reels at center of Covid storm

Registered nurse Kennoka Williamson wears personal protective equipment (PPE) as she attends to patients in a suspected Covid-19 patient triage area set up in a field hospital tent outside the emergency department ofthe MLK Community Hospital Photos: AFP

Deep within a South Los Angeles hospital, a row of elderly Hispanic men lay hooked up to ventilators - their bodies resting in induced comas - while nurses clad in spacesuit-style respirators checked their patients' bleeping monitors in the otherwise eerie silence.

The intensive care unit in one of the city's poorest districts is well-accustomed to death, but with Los Angeles now at the heart of the United States's Covid-19 pandemic, medics say they have never seen anything on this scale.