Medical workers care for patients in the emergency room of Nossa Senhora da Conceicao Hospital, which is overcrowded due to the coronavirus outbreak, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, March 11, 2021. REUTERS / Diego Vara
Hospitals in Brazil no longer needed drugs to calm patients on Thursday, and the reports of the seriously ill were tied up and incubated without effective sedatives.
The scenes that take place in Brazil, one of the countries hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, are putting increasing international pressure on President Jair Bolsonaro.
The Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) aid group said Brazil’s “failed response” had led to thousands of avoidable deaths and caused a humanitarian disaster that could worsen.
Brazil recorded a total of 361,884 coronavirus deaths – the United States alone has more – and 13,673,507 confirmed cases.
More Brazilians are currently dying from the virus every day than anywhere else in the world. Bolsonaro opposed exclusions and held big occasions in which he often did not wear a mask. He recently accepted vaccines as a possible solution.
Brazil’s hospitals are struggling to cope.
Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo both sounded alarms about the shortage of sedatives, while Sao Paulo’s health secretary said the city’s ability to care for seriously ill COVID-19 patients was on the verge of collapse.
“I never thought I would go through something like this after 20 years in intensive care,” Aureo do Carmo Filho, an ICU doctor in Rio, told Reuters.
“The use of mechanical restraints without sedatives is bad practice … the patient is subjected to a form of torture,” he said.
Severely ill COVID-19 patients who have difficulty breathing are anesthetized to place them on ventilators, which can resist the body naturally.
As ICU beds across the country are near or near, hospitals are being forced to create makeshift beds for intensive care that often do not have equipment or professional expertise.
Globo television network on Wednesday reported cases from a Rio hospital in which patients were integrated with a lack of sedatives fastened to beds.
The Albert Schweitzer Hospital, through the press office of the city of Rio that manages it, said there is a shortage of intubation drugs, but that substitutes are being used to ensure that medical assistance is not compromised. It is said that mechanical restraints are only used by a doctor prescribed.
The city of Rio added that a group of intubation drugs would arrive Thursday.
“FAILED ANSWER”
Members of the border said the Bolsonaro government had not done enough to prevent the tragedy.
“More than a year after the COVID-19 pandemic, the failed response in Brazil caused a humanitarian catastrophe,” Christos Christou, a medical doctor and president of MSF, called Doctors Without Borders.
“Every week there is a bad new record of deaths and infections – the hospitals are overflowing and yet there is still no coordinated, centralized response,” Christou said in a briefing with reporters, adding that the situation is expected in the weeks would get even worse. forward.
Bolsonaro has openly opposed state and local governments trying to impose locks, saying Brazilians should continue with normal life and that job losses are more dangerous than the virus.
The director general of MSF, Meinie Nicolai, said that the increase in cases could not only be blamed on the infectious Brazilian COVID-19 variant, known as P.1.
“The P.1 variant is definitely a problem, but it does not explain the situation in Brazil,” she said.
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