MEXICO CITY (AP) — Sometimes Latin American dance tunes on the radio — salsa, cumbia, ranchera — bring a little cheer into the emergency room of Mexico City’s Ajusco Medio hospital, which is operating well over normal capacity because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Dr. Marta Patricia Mancilla, head of the emergency unit, says the upbeat soundtrack is a distraction from the routine at the packed hospital, where some people have kneeled at the doors of the emergency room, praying for relatives suffering from the disease.
It has been eight months since the city-run Ajusco Medio hospital was named as one of the few exclusively COVID-19 hospitals in the city of almost nine million, and empty beds are rare.
“The worst is still to come,” Mancilla said.
“And unfortunately, it is going to catch us very tired,” she said of medical personnel who have been working constantly while themselves vulnerable to the disease. Almost 2,000 health care workers are confirmed to have died of the disease across Mexico.
The toll is psychological and physical, and is as clear as the numbers written on an erasable whiteboard in the office of Dr. Alejandro Avalos, the Ajusco Medio hospital’s director: total patients are at 122% capacity, intensive care is at 116%, and the emergency unit at 100%.
“We haven’t been below 100% since May,” said Avalos, whose hospital — a government facility that treats patients for free — has been temporarily expanded to meet the waves of coronavirus cases. Citywide, occupancy at hospitals was 69% this week.
Yet as full as the city’s hospitals are, its streets are also once again thronged; in some more central parts of the metropolis, almost everyone wears a face mask, but in other poorer, outlying areas, fewer people do.
The situation has officials worried. Millions normally gather each year for the Dec. 12 holiday of Mexico’s holy Virgin of Guadalupe day, and huge family gatherings are the norm for Christmas in Mexico.
It drew an urgent appeal from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Friday, who decreed an expansion of 500 more hospital beds in Mexico City and pleaded with Mexicans to stop crowding the streets and stay home in December.
“In this month, December, there are traffic problems, there are growing numbers of vehicles in the streets,” the president said. “Right now, we cannot act like this.”
López Obrador announced new hiring to help exhausted medical personnel. “There is a lot of tiredness, fatigue,” he said.
At least 13,800 people have died of COVID-19 in Mexico City alone, according to official data. Authorities say the number is probably higher in part because of limited testing, especially in the early months of the pandemic.
Methods have improved since the city’s hospitals were overwhelmed in May and June, when patients were treated in hallways and relatives of the dead were not even…
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