Brazil's COVID Response In Free-Fall; Amazonas State Getting Oxygen Shipped From Venezuela
It took just 60 minutes at daybreak for the seven patients to die, asphyxiated as coronavirus swept back into the Brazilian Amazon with nightmarish force. “Today was one of the hardest days in all my years of public service. You feel so impotent,” sobbed Francisnalva Mendes, the health chief in the river town of Coari, as she remembered the moment on Tuesday when its hospital’s oxygen supply ran out. “We need to get back to the fight – to carry on saving lives,” Mendes insisted as she digested losing a third of her town’s 22 Covid-19 patients in one fell swoop – four of them in their 50s. “But we all feel broken. It was such a hard day.”
Coari was at the centre of Latin America’s latest coronavirus catastrophe last week after a surge in infections linked to a new and seemingly more contagious variant overwhelmed hospitals in Brazil’s Amazonas state, leaving many without even the most basic supplies. Circumstances were so bleak oxygen tankers were rushed over the border from Venezuela, the economically collapsed nation next door, with its leader, Nicolás Maduro, decrying what he called “Jair Bolsonaro’s public health disaster”.
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“There’s an atmosphere of disgust, abandonment, despair and impunity,” said one staff member at the Alvorada health clinic in Manaus, where medics were filmed pleading for divine intervention. “What we’re watching is a complete massacre, a desperate situation, a horror film,” added the worker, who asked not to be named. Much of the anger is directed at the government of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has trivialized Covid-19 even as his country’s death toll soared to the second highest on earth.
Bolsonaro’s biddable health minister, Eduardo Pazuello – an army general with no medical experience – visited Manaus on the eve of last week’s health collapse but pushed bogus Covid-19 “early treatments” promoted by his leader rather than solving the impending oxygen crisis. “The president’s bootlicker had days of warning that Manaus’s hospitals were going to run out of oxygen. He did nothing but prescribe useless chloroquine,” the journalist Luiz Fernando Vianna wrote in the magazine Época, blaming Bolsonaro and Pazuello for the “slaughter”.
Lacerda accused the government of trying to distract citizens from its deadly inaction with the “false hope” of ineffectual remedies. “This isn’t happening in any other part of the planet,” he said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/24/brazil-covid-coronavirus-deaths-cases-amazonas-state