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.
âWe need to get back to the fight â to carry on saving lives,â Mendes insisted as she digested losing a third of her townâs 22 Covid-19 patients in one fell swoop â four of them in their 50s. âBut we all feel broken. It was such a hard day.â
Coari was at the centre of Latin Americaâs latest coronavirus catastrophe last week after a surge in infections linked to a new and seemingly more contagious variant overwhelmed hospitals in Brazilâs 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 âJair Bolsonaroâs public health disasterâ.
Threat of fascistic coup grows in Brazil amid COVID vaccination failure
Vaccination of Brazil’s population against COVID-19 began on Monday. As in the rest of the world, after an intense media campaign around the vaccination, which was at the same time aimed at stifling any discussion of necessary social measures to combat the pandemic, the actual distribution of the vaccine in the country is proving a fiasco.
A new patient suspected of having COVID-19 is pulled into the Regional Hospital of Samambaia, which specializes in the care of coronavirus patients in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)
Cemetery workers carry the remains of 89-year-old Abilio Ribeiro, who died of the new coronavirus, for burial at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery in Manaus, Amazonas state, Brazil, on Jan. 6. The day before, Manaus declared a 180-day state of emergency due to a surge of new cases of the coronavirus. Edmar Barros / AP
Originally published on January 22, 2021 2:55 pm
When the health system first collapsed in the Amazonian city of Manaus, Brazil, and COVID-19 victims were buried in mass graves, the mayor sent a desperate appeal to then-President Donald Trump and other world leaders. We are doing our best, but I tell you, it s still very little in [the] face of the oncoming barbarism said Arthur Virgílio Neto in a video message. We cannot be silent. We need all possible help.
In ‘dire’ plea, Brazil’s Amazonas state appeals for global COVID assistance
In a letter describing pandemic conditions as “dire,” the government of Brazil’s Amazonas state is pleading for urgent medical assistance from the international community. The authenticated letter apparently bypassed the Bolsonaro administration which critics say has been ineffectual in dealing with COVID-19.
Manaus, the Amazonas state capital, was overwhelmed by the coronavirus last April, but this second wave, according to state authorities is far worse, impacting not only the city, but increasingly, the state’s rainforest interior. The soaring number of cases and deaths statewide is yet to be fully tallied.