Jaime Patino:

My name is Jaime Patino, councilman for the city of Union City, California.

My grandmother is Emma Patino. She was a resident of Gateway nursing home in Hayward, California. She is currently at Kaiser San Leandro in the ICU, and with a very grim outlook.

We were only allowed to visit my grandmother through the window of her room. She has dementia, so she didn't really understand why we couldn't go inside and why we couldn't visit her. But that's what we did for about two weeks, until this past Wednesday, when I got a news alert via e-mail from The East Bay Times saying that six people had passed away there at Gateway.

On Friday morning at 3:00 a.m., my dad received a phone call that she was being transported to Kaiser Hospital San Leandro because her oxygen levels had gone down. And when she got there, they found out that, not only was COVID-19-positive, but it had gone into her lungs, but her kidneys were starting to fail.

Her heart was being stressed because it was fighting the disease, and she also had septic shock.