With hospitals overrun and supplies of oxygen running out, Brazilian epidemiologist Jesem Orellana said COVID-19 patients’ hospital beds in Manaus, the capital of the country’s Amazonas region, turned into “asphyxiation chambers”.
“Manaus is lost,” said Orellana, who described the city as an open-air laboratory “where all types of negligence and inhumanity are possible” and in which people are dying at home with no medical support.
He warned that the collapse of the local healthcare system, propelled in part by the discovery of a potentially more contagious variant of COVID-19 in the region, could happen in other parts of Brazil, too.
Health system collapsed as virus surges in Amazon city 00:52
Manaus (CNN)It s waiting hours in line to buy an oxygen tank only to find there s none left. For some, it s rushing from hospital to hospital with a sick spouse or parent only to find there are no beds available. For others, it s waiting outside of hospitals for news of a loved one only to hear they could not be saved.
For the medical workers, it s frantic 36-hour shifts. For the gravediggers, it s moving the tons of dirt required to create 20,000 more graves.
For the dead, it s the vertical burial, with bodies stacked atop each other in the increasingly crowded cemeteries of Manaus, Brazil.
La pesadilla de morir asfixiado en los hospitales de la Amazonia elpais.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from elpais.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Faced with the collapse of the healthcare system because of the second wave of coronavirus in Manaus, epidemiologist Jesem Orellana, of Fiocruz-Amazônia, advocated the urgent sending of an international observer mission, in an alert released on Thursday, January 21st, because "it is no longer possible to rely on the various management levels at the forefront of the epidemic".