US President-elect Joe Biden had to wipe away tears as he had an emotional conversation with a frontline healthcare worker about COVID-19.
Biden was part of a 'virtual open table' presented by US news organisation C-SPAN, where he spoke to several healthcare workers about the pandemic.
Nurse and President of the Minnesota Nurses Association Mary Turner was one of the speakers at the virtual meeting, detailing what it was like to be on the frontline during a health crisis.
Turner begins to describe how COVID-19 cases were "surging" in Minnesota and the stress it was causing healthcare workers.
"We aren't prepared. We don't have the necessary resources to keep patients and our workers safe," she says.
"Nurses I'm telling you are feeling extremely anxious right now. We know the right way to battle this virus, but our employers and our government are not supporting us."
Turner went on to speak about how she held the hands of dying patients "crying out to their families that they can't see".
She describes the everyday-horror nurses face, not being provided with appropriate protection for themselves and knowing their dying patients caught COVID-19 at the hospital.
She says her hospital is having to reuse N95 masks two times, with a number of nurses contracting the virus.
Throughout the speech, Biden can be seen looking sombre, and after Turner says she hasn't received a COVID-19 test even after working in the ICU since February he began to wipe away tears.
"You got me emotional," Biden says before going on to speak about his time in the ICU and the "mental strain" he watched nurses suffer from.
"There are a whole lot of things that we don't have available to us and unless it is made available soon we will begin by weeks or months," Biden says.
"I have no budget, I can't do any of this until I am sworn in or I can convince the president now to do things that should be being done already."
Nearly 79,000 Americans were hospitalised with COVID-19 on Thursday, with more than 90 percent of ICU beds in Minnesota, where Turner works, taken up by COVID-19 patients.
Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz called a shut-down order on Friday, closing bars, restaurants and fitness centres.
Walz says it was necessary to try to halt the surge of the virus.
