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.
Fiocruz infectologist Marcus Lacerda attends to at least 40 cases of Covid-19 in Manaus, capital city of the Brazilian Amazonas state, every day and is surprised that, unlike the first wave in early 2020, this time whole families have contracted the disease. He believes the emergence of a new strain of the coronavirus may be partly responsible.