Oxygen shortage plunges the Amazon capital into a covid nightmare

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Brazil is one of the countries most affected by the pandemic, but the situation in the Amazon region is even worse. Graves are being hastily excavated in uneven rows, hospitals are being invaded, there are patients flying to other places for treatment and there are reports that a recovering Covid-19 patient was reinfected by a more contagious variant that goes appearing recently in the area.

Now, the medical facilities in Manaus, the largest city and capital of the state of Amazonas, are dangerously low on oxygen after being completely depleted earlier this month. On Wednesday, the Pope said he was praying especially for the people of Manaus. According to a study published in Science in December, it is estimated that 76% of the city’s population has detectable antibodies, a proportion nearly three times higher than the country’s original coronavirus epicenter: Sao Paulo.

Amid oxygen shortages, hospitals were forced to move dozens of premature babies to other states as the federal government stepped in and stumbled to send supplies to the remote region. Influencers on social media and celebrities rented private tanks full of tanks in the Amazon, and even Venezuela, the most unstable country in South America, began sending trucks with oxygen to the border.

On earth, families in need of beautiful drums struggle to find enough oxygen to keep loved ones alive. At the northern end of Manaus, inside a small red hut that goes back to the rainforest, the Vasconcelos de Jesus family gathers in their son’s bedroom, where two tall green oxygen tanks keep him alive. Davi Emanuel, 10, is in a vegetative state in a bed his mother decorated with photos of his son during the happiest days, before 2018, when he contracted the H1N1 virus and became comatose and dependent. of oxygen. Now, Davi Emanuel and his parents have hired Covid, leaving friends and family competing to fill the oxygen cylinders that quickly run out before the city’s supply runs out.

Vaccines will not come to the rescue soon. Brazil lags behind neighboring countries in the race to inoculate and Manaus suspended shooting for 24 hours just three days after the arrival of its first batch, because it could not distribute the doses correctly.

After several family members became ill with the virus, Amanda Larrat, 26, helped relatives set up hospital settings in her home, even hiring a private doctor to care for the group. “I don’t trust the public health system,” Bloomberg photographer Jonne Roriz said. “I won’t let my whole family die.”

Most families in the Amazon, one of the poorest regions in Brazil, do not have the capacity to do the same. In some cases, health professionals have told the families of hospitalized patients to wait in line at an oxygen recharging station and bring the containers back to bed. Other families are trying to get oxygen for home use, hoping to avoid hospitals.

This week, 40-year-old Helmo Queiroz waited in line from 7 a.m. until after midnight to refill an oxygen tank for his sister, who was at Covid’s sick home. A refill of tanks in Manaus in early January cost 100 reais ($ 18), but with the shortage, the price had multiplied by six in a week, he said. Queiroz feared that if he took his sister to the hospital, he would die. Recharging would only take five hours. “I’ll be back again in the morning,” he said.

On the evening of January 18, the first vaccines against Covid-19 arrived in Manaus. Vanda Ortega, a 33-year-old indigenous nurse, was the first to be vaccinated. Ortega is a member of the Witoto, a 700-family tribe that is one of the 63 indigenous peoples of the Amazon, the Brazilian state with the largest population.

Throughout the pandemic, remote indigenous communities have been fighting for equal access to medical services. Although the state has a special department for indigenous health, resources are often directed to forest-bounded indigenous territories rather than to urban communities such as Ortega’s.

He lives in an impoverished Manaus neighborhood called Parc de les Tribus, with no clinic nearby. Ortega has spent hours off duty transporting medical supplies and equipment to his neighbors, fighting in hospital beds and helping to spread information on how to protect himself from the virus, while wearing a mask that reads: “Indigenous lives are important ”. He helped the community establish an indigenous hospital, where four infected patients are now in hammocks, in a closed room with an open ceiling.

The federal health ministry said in a Jan. 21 statement that 6 million doses of the Coronavac vaccine available through the Butantan Institute were being distributed to state and municipal governments “proportionately and equally,” but that the responsibility for the distribution on the land would rest with the local authorities.

This process has already had obstacles.

A few hours after the first vaccines were injected on live television in the arms of representative patients such as Ortega, the children of wealthy families in Manaus posted on social media that they had also been shot. The Amazon State Court of Auditors is studying the issue; its president said Wednesday that the court “would not allow any political interference in the vaccination campaign” and that anyone caught receiving the vaccine before their turn would be punished.

– With the assistance of Martha Viotti Beck