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The government of the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, which is not recognized by Brazil, announced this Saturday that it will send oxygen to the Amazonian city of Manaus, badly hit by a second wave of covid-19.
“Yesterday I gave the good news to the Governor of the Amazonas state of Brazil, that today Saturday the first cylinder trucks with thousands of liters of oxygen leave (…) towards Manaus,” Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza wrote on Twitter.
The Venezuelan government has not yet responded to a request from Agence France-Presse to specify the number of trucks sent, if the mission has already left, and if it received authorization from the government of the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro, which does not recognize Maduro as president but rather the leader. opponent Juan Guaidó.
The Bolsonaro government has also not spoken out so far.
A second wave of the coronavirus overwhelmed hospitals in the Brazilian state of Amazonas (north) and practically depleted their oxygen reserves.
Already last year he had recorded mass burials and a collapse of his health system.
Images on social networks of people carrying tanks to hospitals, stories of doctors having to manually ventilate their patients and of patients dying from suffocation scandalized Brazil; while the local government imposed a curfew for 10 days to try to contain the situation.
The Bolsonaro government has reported that it is sending oxygen cylinders from other states, and that it has begun to fly patients to other regions.
“Amazon thank you”
Arreaza had already announced last Thursday that the government would “immediately make available” to Amazonas “the oxygen necessary to attend to the contingency.”
“The people of Amazonas are grateful,” replied Governor Wilson Lima, of the PSC, a Bolsonaro allied party.
Venezuela, however, faces the collapse of its own health system, with scarce medical supplies or protective material for covid-19, as part of the deepest economic crisis in its recent history.
Jaime Lorenzo, a member of the NGO Médicos Unidos Venezuela, assured AFP that oxygen has not been in short supply in Venezuelan hospitals, according to his latest balance in November 2020, but that the infrastructure to deal with respiratory problems is very precarious.
“You can have oxygen, but if you don’t have the equipment, how do you attend to the patient?”, he pointed.
However, in the state of Táchira, on the border with Colombia and hard hit by the pandemic, there are people who must go to the black market to buy oxygen.
Magaly Castro, a 49-year-old hairdresser, paid $ 30 for a bottle for her sick son, almost 15 times the minimum income, consumed by rampant hyperinflation.
“This is very hard,” Castro said. “I recently sold an air conditioner and a refrigerator that I had used and (those savings) I am spending on this which is an emergency.”
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