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101-year-old Chilean doctor tells what it feels like to live the sixth pandemic of his life
According to Osvaldo Olivares, the great requirement to work in health is “to have tremendously strong morals and ethics.” On the coronavirus, his advice is clear: “Let’s be strict.”
Osvaldo Olivares it has more than a century of life. In the midst of a health emergency, this Chilean doctor from Taltal can say that he has already faced six pandemics throughout his 101 years of existence.
He was born in 1918, just when two pandemics plagued the world: “According to statistics, more people died from the pandemic than from the war,” he says.
The first virus he had to face was the smallpox. Her father, also a doctor, tried to eradicate it in the nitrate offices.
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Then came typhus. After this, he trained as an internist, and in the 1950s he faced a pandemic for the first time as a professional: asian flu, who claimed the lives of 40 thousand Chileans: “You cannot imagine what it is to be in an emergency department, and that hundreds of people arrive,” he recalls, in conversation with 24 Hours Central.
TO WORK IN HEALTH “YOU NEED TO HAVE A MORAL AND AN ETHICS”
Dr. Olivares was a representative of the Medical College during the Popular Unit and exiled in 1974. Working in Colombia as director of the Tolima Hospital, he had to face the HIV.
Back in our country, he faced a bacterium: the anger. However, today for the first time a pandemic like the COVID-19 in the running of the bulls.
Don Osvaldo, who sometimes asks himself “how I have lived so long”, admits that he misses his family very much and emphasizes with certainty that he is not afraid to die: “Dying is no longer scary to me. I have already lived so long.”
Regarding his current colleagues, he notes that “luckily they are applauding him, but recently they were attacking them. They have beaten them, as well as auxiliary personnel.” In this sense, he reflects and maintains that more than “hero”, to be a health worker “you have to have a very strong moral and ethics.”
Lastly, he offers advice to face the period of the pandemic: “Let’s be strict, keep all the indications you give us to defend ourselves, our family members, our friends and Chileans in general.”
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