A South Dakota ER nurse says some patients refuse to believe the coronavirus is real — even in their final moments

• A South Dakota ER nurse said some people refuse to believe the coronavirus is real, even until their final moments.
• "I think the hardest thing to watch is that people are still looking for something else and they want a magic answer and they don't want to believe that COVID is real," she said on CNN's "New Day" Monday morning.
• The politicization of response to the coronavirus has led many to trivialize the risk of the disease, experts told Business Insider's Sarah Al-Arshani.

A South Dakota ER nurse says some people refuse to believe that the coronavirus is real — even in their final moments.

For many patients their "last dying words are 'this can't be happening, it's not real,' and when they should be spending time FaceTiming their families they're filled with anger and hatred," Jodi Doering, an ER nurse in South Dakota said on CNN's "New Day" Monday morning.

"I think the hardest thing to watch is that people are still looking for something else and they want a magic answer and they don't want to believe that COVID is real," she said.

She added that even after testing positive for the coronavirus, patients will refuse to believe that the virus is real.

"[I] think people look for anything. People want it to be influenza, they want it to be pneumonia," she said.

Doering's interview on CNN came days after she said in a viral tweet on Saturday evening that patients with coronavirus "tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that "stuff" because they don't have [COVID-19] because it's not real."

As of Monday, South Dakota has over 65,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus according to Johns Hopkins University. The US continues to see an increase in confirmed cases of coronavirus, surpassing 11 million cases in total, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Even so, the politicization of response to the coronavirus coupled with the country's emphasis on independence has led many to trivialize the risk of the disease, experts told Business Insider's Sarah Al-Arshani. That, coupled with pandemic fatigue, has made Americans more likely to engage in high-risk behavior.

"These people really think this isn't going to happen to them," Doering wrote on Twitter. "And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It's like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There's no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again."

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