Brazilian Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello said the hospital system in the city of Manaus is collapsing.
The Brazilian state of Amazon is running out of oxygen during a new rise in deaths from COVID-19, its government said on Thursday, with media reporting that people with respirators die from suffocation in hospitals.
The state has made a dramatic call to the United States to send a military transport plane to the capital Manaus with oxygen cylinders.
Brazilian Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello said the city’s hospital system is collapsing from a second wave of COVID-19 and running out of oxygen. He said the city’s hospitals are short of medical staff as deaths rise again.
“They took my father out of the oxygen,” Raissa Floriano said in front of the August 28 hospital in Manaus, where people were protesting because relatives suffering from severe cases of COVID-19 were disconnected from the fans for lack of of oxygen.
Crying, Floriano said he was looking for an oxygen cylinder to save his father Alfonso, 73.
Brazil is home to the second deadliest coronavirus outbreak in the world after the United States. The country has reported more than 207,000 deaths, according to a Johns Hopkins University count. Manaus was one of the first Brazilian cities to be hit by a spiral of deaths and cases from the first wave of the pandemic last year.
A health worker reacts at Getulio Vargas Hospital, amid the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Manaus, Brazil, on January 14, 2021 [Bruno Kelly/Reuters]
With emergency services pushed to the point of rupture, Gov. Nelson Lima announced a statewide curfew to stop the spread of the coronavirus during the devastating second wave.
Health officials said the oxygen supply had been depleted in some hospitals and that intensive care units were so full that many patients were being relocated to other states.
Amazon Health Secretary Marcellus Campelo said the state needs almost three times more oxygen than it can produce locally and called for supplies from other states.
Public health experts gave dramatic news of people dying of COVID-19 in oxygen-free ICUs.
“Oxygen has been depleted and hospitals have become suffocation chambers,” Jesoc Orellana, a researcher at Fiocruz-Amazonia, told the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. “Patients who manage to survive could suffer permanent brain damage,” he said.
Meanwhile, a new variant of the virus was detected in Japan on Sunday to four people who had come from the Amazon and the United Kingdom banned the new arrival from Brazil for fears of the new variant.
The researchers said the new variant could contribute to the sharp rise in cases in the Amazon state, although more studies were being conducted to determine if it is more contagious than previous versions of the coronavirus.
The neighboring state of Para announced on Thursday that it was banning travel boats going down the river from the Amazon, citing an increase in cases and the identification of the new variant.
The UK said it would ban travelers from Brazil, several South American countries and Portugal. The new variant features 12 mutations, including one that is also found in highly infectious variants recently discovered in the UK and South Africa that have begun to circulate around the world.
Amazon Foundation researchers Oswaldo Cruz said the new variant found in Japan probably appeared in northern Brazil between December and January.