The health workers began their hunger strike on Tuesday in front of the Ministry of Labor in the capital Lima. About a dozen doctors from the National Trade Union Confederation for Social Security took part in protests as the health system struggled to cope with the second wave of Covid-19.
“We have started a hunger strike,” Teodoro Quinones, a doctor involved in the protest, told Reuters.
Quinones said the strike would last until Peru’s Labor minister removed the country’s head of social security, Fiorella Molinelli, who oversees the government’s efforts to set up temporary health and isolation centers for Covid – 19 patients. to rig.
Molinelli has not commented on the union’s demands since Thursday.
The protesters sharply criticized the government’s approach to the pandemic, calling for greater investment in the health sector.
“Our ICUs are collapsing and we are not receiving any response and we are seeing the indifference of a government allocating the budget to us,” Peruvian nurse Ketty Solier told Reuters on Tuesday.
“We urgently need to purchase this equipment to prevent more Peruvian people from dying. The Peruvian state has a constitutional obligation to guarantee the accessibility of health services, and they are currently refusing access to hospitals because we no longer have the capacity to care for patients. provide what they need so much, ‘she added.
“People are infected, there are no ICU beds, soon there will be no more hospitalization. Once again we are going to see people die in the streets. About the vaccine we have no hope for the vaccine, we do not know when it will go not arriving, ‘Ronald Castañeda, a relative of a Covid-19 patient, told Reuters.
According to the director of the Pan-American Health Organization, Carissa Etienne, the occupancy rate of the ICU in some parts of Peru is 90%.
‘We start with a second wave [of Covid-19 cases]. This wave is rising. “I can tell you that we did some calculations and that we were more or less right when we were in mid-April, and the numbers are still rising,” Health Minister Pilar Mazzetti told local media on Monday.
On Tuesday, Peru’s interim president, Francisco Sagasti, approved a decision to fund the construction of more than 16 temporary isolation centers across the country and to hire additional staff to expand health services, according to a Tuesday press release from the ministry. of Health.
Sagasti becomes president in November 2020 and becomes the third president to be sworn in in just over a week as the country has struggled with political unrest amid the pandemic.