CNN reporter covering COVID-19 in US breaks down on live TV; watch video

New York: This was coming for a long time in a country that accounts for the world’s highest coronavirus caseload and deaths.

A CNN reporter broke down on live television earlier this week while reporting from Los Angeles about a woman who lost both her parents to COVID-19 and had to hold her mother’s funeral in a parking lot because there’s no place for the dead.

“What moved me to tears was, at first, simply rage. Rage at those who won’t take our ills seriously and those who are actively fighting against the truth. They are putting people’s lives in danger,” Sara Sidner wrote in a first person account from the latest epicentre of the pandemic: California.

The coronavirus has killed more than 30,000 people in California alone since the pandemic began. More than 2.6 million people have been infected in the state.

Echoing the zeitgeist, Sidner tweeted, “Here is what I have learned during the pandemic. Heroes don’t wear capes. They wear scrubs.”

While on air, Sidner was recounting the story of Juliana Jimenez Sesma who left her real estate job to take care of her mother, who was dealing with a lung condition and was at high risk if she contracted the virus.

Despite Sesma’s efforts to protect her loved ones, the whole family ended up getting infected and Sesma lost her stepfather and mother in the space of less than a fortnight.

The CNN reporter met Sesma at her mother’s funeral. “It was a most disturbing scene,” she writes. “An open casket in the corner of a parking lot — the only place available and safe for people to gather — with flowers perched on the asphalt below.”

Sidner signed off on her blog with this: “So when you saw me cry, you witnessed my rage. I care about my country. I worry about the new and old ills facing us. And I feel like my country is on life support.”

IANS