Medical workers care for patients in the emergency room of the Nossa Senhora da Conceicao hospital which is overcrowded due to the coronavirus outbreak, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on March 11, 2021. REUTERS / Diego Vara
Hospitals in Brazil ran out of drugs needed to sedate patients on Thursday, with reports that the seriously ill were tied up and intubated without effective sedatives.
Scenes being staged across Brazil, one of the countries hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, are putting increasing pressure on President Jair Bolsonaro.
The aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Brazil’s “failed response” caused thousands of preventable deaths and created a humanitarian catastrophe that could be made even worse.
Brazil has recorded a total of 361,884 coronavirus deaths (only the United States has more) and 13,673,507 confirmed cases.
Today, there are more Brazilians dying from the virus every day than anywhere else in the world. Bolsonaro has opposed the blockades and held large events in which he often does not wear a mask. He has recently adopted vaccines as a possible solution.
Brazil’s hospitals are struggling to cope.
Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have sounded the alarm over the shortage of sedatives, and the Sao Paulo Health Secretary has said the city’s ability to care for critically ill patients with COVID-19 is about to collapse. to slip.
“I never thought I would live something like this after 20 years working in intensive care,” Aureo do Carmo Filho, an ICU doctor in Rio, told Reuters.
“Using mechanical restraints without sedatives is a bad practice … the patient is subjected to a form of torture,” he said.
Patients with severe COVID-19 disease who have difficulty breathing are sedated to put them in ventilators, an intrusive practice that the body can naturally resist.
With ICU beds across the country or almost to their capacity, hospitals are forced to create makeshift intensive care beds that often lack the equipment or professional experience.
Globo television reported on Wednesday cases of a hospital in Rio in which patients were intubated with a lack of sedatives, tied to the beds.
Albert Schweitzer Hospital, through the Rio City press office that manages it, said there was a shortage of drugs for intubation, but that substitutes were used to ensure medical care was not she was engaged. It was said that mechanical restraints were only used when the doctor prescribed it.
The city of Rio added that a batch of drugs for intubation was to be reached on Thursday.
“FAILED ANSWER”
Doctors Without Borders said the Bolsonaro government had not done enough to prevent the tragedy.
“More than a year after the COVID-19 pandemic, the failed response in Brazil has caused a humanitarian catastrophe,” said Christos Christou, a doctor and president of MSF, called Médecins Sans Frontières.
“Every week a new record of deaths and infections is recorded: hospitals are overflowing and yet there is still no centralized and coordinated response,” Christou said in a briefing with reporters, adding that s ‘he hoped the situation would get worse in the weeks ahead.
Bolsonaro has openly fought state and local governments that want to establish closures, saying Brazilians must continue with normal life and that job loss is more dangerous than the virus.
MSF CEO Meinie Nicolai said the increase in cases could not be blamed solely on the contagious Brazilian variant COVID-19, known as P.1.
“The P.1 variant is certainly a problem, but that doesn’t explain the situation in Brazil,” he said.
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