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The city of Manaus, capital of the jungle state of Amazonas in Brazil, is experiencing health chaos due to the new coronavirus: Medical personnel are lacking, some hospitals store corpses in refrigerated trucks, and cemeteries began to open mass graves.
“It is a scene in life from a horror movie. The state is no longer of emergency, but of absolute calamity ”, describes the city’s mayor, Arthur Virgilio Neto, in a telephone interview with AFP.
In Manaus, an average of 20 to 30 people died a day, but the number rose to “more than 100” a day and the deficit health system collapsed in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, which is reaching the remote indigenous communities of this state of 1.5 million km2 (almost triple that of Spain).
“People are dying at home (…), some perhaps because they did not have medical assistance”, adds the mayor, who suspects that “at the bottom it was covid-19” that caused these deaths.
Amazonas is the fifth state hardest hit by the new coronavirus, but Manaus – with 1.7 million inhabitants – has the highest mortality rate of the 27 state capitals.
Brazil is the Latin American country with the highest number of deaths and infections: more than 3,000 and more than 49,000, respectively. Figures that according to experts could be up to 15 times higher and that do not reflect reality due to the lack of exams for covid-19.
The increase in cases in Manaus has pushed hospitals into the abyss, who installed cold rooms in trucks to preserve the bodies.
Outside the Delphina Rinaldi Abdel Aziz hospital, Rita Alencar waits for someone to tell her if she can take her grandmother’s body to bury it.
“No one has yet appeared to give me an answer to take my grandmother out and bury her. She did not die of covid-19, ”says Alencar.
In the Parque Taruma public cemetery they are opening mass graves to bury the victims of covid-19; By order of the mayor, a maximum of five family members can say a brief and final goodbye to their loved ones.
“We are doing hard work to bury people. We already had sick gravediggers, who contracted coronavirus, some will not come out alive ”, regrets the mayor of Manaus, who has requested more resources from the government of Jair Bolsonaro to attend to the emergency.
“It is a very big fight, very hard,” he says.
Videos that circulated on social networks showed rows of funeral vehicles waiting their turn to enter the cemetery.
Centralized system, collapsed system
Local authorities built a field hospital and the federal government summoned doctors from all over the country to help in the crisis.
But these measures to reinforce the system come too late and the situation is “extremely worrying” since Manaus concentrates all the Intensive Care Units (ICU) of Amazonas and 80% of specialized doctors, explains the infectious disease specialist Bernardo Albuquerque, from the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM).
The pandemic boom is expected from May, but Manaus already has 90% of its ICU beds occupied, protection supplies are lacking for health officials, as well as CT scanners and medications.
“The system is really centralized in the capital,” Albuquerque tells AFP.
This forces seriously ill patients from the remaining 61 municipalities of Amazonas, located in many cases to days by boat, to travel to the capital to be treated.
Only 18 municipalities are connected by road to the capital, “the rest only have access by river and very few by air”Albuquerque says.
And when the patient manages to travel to Manaus, he arrives “in a deplorable situation or has no guarantees of receiving adequate care. It is a dramatic situation ”, adds the mayor.
Indigenous concern
The picture is more complicated. Amazon concentrates the largest indigenous population in the country, a risk group, historically decimated by viruses from outside.
Three indigenous people have died from coronavirus and at least 15 of the 31 infected are in Manaus.
The federal government has offered to build a field hospital for indigenous care, but local authorities are still waiting for it to be completed.
The Ministry of Health already anticipated in April that a catastrophe was looming in Amazonas.
The response to the situation has to come “as quickly as possible,” says Albuquerque.
“If we could snap our fingers and say that everything is ready tomorrow, that would be the ideal time,” he adds.
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