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In these places, which are not the largest in their countries but become the epicenter of the pandemic, the health and funeral systems have collapsed, or are about to do so, due to the uncontrolled way in which the disease is progressing, which already leaves more than 125,000 cases and 6,000 deaths in the region, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO). And the worst: the maximum peak of COVID-19 has not even reached and is expected in mid or late May.
BODIES IN THE STREETS
“Guayaquil has experienced one of the greatest tragedies in history,” Cynthia Viteri, mayor of a town that condenses much of the coronavirus drama in Latin America, said on Friday.
The second largest city in Ecuador went from being the economic center of the country to the scene of a Dantesque situation: people taking corpses out of their homes and leaving them in the streets with a sheet on, people desperately searching for weeks for their relatives in the morgues and then enduring a wait of up to four days to bury them.
With at least 520 deaths and 10,400 official infections, Guayaquil adds 51% of cases across the country, which is aggravated when knowing that Guayas, the province of which it is the capital, has added almost 8,000 “extra” deaths since it began the health crisis in the country on February 29 and of which, the authorities themselves acknowledge, it is almost impossible to know the exact causes.
“In a cemetery here in Guayaquil before the pandemic they had an average of 10-20 burials a day. Then I saw the list of deceased and they had 140 at 5.30 in the afternoon,” Merwin Terán, president of the Association of Funeral Directors, told Efe. del Guayas, to later add: “They cannot tell me that they are not because … Where did so much dead come from? That was COVID, there was nothing else left.”
To all this is added that with the passing of days the contempt in the streets to the orders of confinement is palpable and, for example, last Monday and Tuesday long lines of vehicles were seen on the main bridge entering the city , like it’s a normal business day.
“The increase in mobility is very worrying and dangerous. In the last week the increase in Guayaquil is 17.7%. If we let our guard down we will lose lives,” President Lenín Moreno wrote on Twitter.
OVERFLOWED HOSPITALS AND COMMON GRAVES
In Manaus, the emergency affects both the living and the dead. The hospitals are collapsed and the coffins no longer fit in their largest cemetery, so the bodies are now going to try to rest in mass graves: from an average of 20 to 35 daily burials, it has gone to almost 100.
Very few beds and almost no equipment for severe cases, refrigerators recently installed in a hospital to make up for the lack of space for bodies, health workers in white suits, masks and gloves moving bodies and bulldozers opening trenches in the cemetery.
The State is extremely absent, “denounced Luigi Fernandes, who suffered the death of his 67-year-old mother-in-law a couple of weeks ago because of COVID-19 and who said that in the hospital where she was hospitalized for 8 days , the x-rays did not work, they only had a respirator and they had to buy the drugs themselves.
An x-ray alone shows that the 2,270 confirmed cases and 193 deaths that are officially reported in the Brazilian Amazon are far from the true dimension of the problem in this area of northern Brazil.
The other countries “can help with resources, with medicine remittances, sending rapid tests, protective equipment, because many doctors are working without equipment (…),” Virgilio Neo, mayor of that country, told Efe last Wednesday. city with 1.8 million inhabitants concentrates almost half of the population of the state of Amazonas.
FORTEN IN THE AMAZON
About 700 infected and 23 dead. Although the Loreto region ranks fourth in Peru, these are numbers that at the current juncture of the pandemic do not seem catastrophic but have already caused the morgue of the provincial hospital, in the heart of the Amazon, to exceed its capacity and cannot receive more corpses, while those that remain remain piled inside black garbage bags.
Iquitos, the largest city in the Amazon in Peru, is the one that concentrates most of the problems of the region, in which containment measures such as quarantines or the use of masks are practically non-existent and that also includes the indigenous communities around it. , who live far from hospitals and health centers. From six to eight hours and up to three days by river. That is what it takes the inhabitants of the area to take to those health posts.
“More than 60% of the communities lack medical posts and those that exist are shortaged, do not have equipment or medications and it is difficult to apply the intercultural approach,” denounced the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the East (ORPIO) days ago, with Based in Iquitos, that’s why, warn ORPIO and other indigenous organizations: if the coronavirus outbreak is not contained, the damage will be dramatic.
HOSPITAL SATURATION AT THE BORDER WITH THE USA
“We are on the verge of saturation.” Thus, emphatically, in an interview with Efe, the Mexican undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion, Hugo López Gatell, referred to the situation in Tijuna, on the border with the United States, and where until that day they had been reported 588 infections and 89 deaths, more than half that in all of Baja California, to which it belongs.
Although currently the hospital occupation in that state is between 44.9% and 73.02%, depending on the entity, and with a use of 69% of the fans available, what worries the authorities is that the Maximum peak of the disease is estimated to occur between May 8 and 10, and Tijuana, along with Mexico City, is the epicenter of the pandemic in the country.
In addition, recently the state governor, Jaime Bonilla, assured that the health workers are “falling like flies” due to the lack of protection and security at the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS).
A conjuncture by which the regional authorities prepare for a saturation of the health system, despite the fact that Baja California, and “in particular Tijuana”, is where the greatest compliance is given with social isolation measures, with 74%, according to The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, recognized this Friday.
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