Brazil’s healthcare system has been plunged into the most severe crisis in its history, with doctors overwhelmed and patients dying while they wait for intensive care beds as the country’s Covid-sceptic president, Jair Bolsonaro, continued to spurn calls for a lockdown that would save lives.
As the daily number of infections and deaths soared to new heights this week, researchers from Brazil’s leading healthcare institute, Fiocruz, said South America’s biggest country faced an unparalleled “catastrophe”.
Covid intensive care units in virtually all of Brazil’s 26 states and the federal district containing the capital, Brasília, are now either at, or perilously close to capacity, the institute said, warning: “The situation is absolutely critical.”
Brazil’s far-right leader and his allies continue to downplay an outbreak that has killed more than 287,000 people, the second highest number on Earth, and, partly as a result of the more contagious P1 variant, is now accelerating into by far its most deadly phase.
“Our situation isn’t all that critical. Compared to other countries, it’s actually quite comfortable,” said Ricardo Barros, Bolsonaro’s leader in the lower house, on Wednesday as 2,798 fatalities and a record 90,830 new cases were reported.
But interviews with intensive care physicians in four of the worst-hit states – Mato Grosso do Sul, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo – gave the lie to that claim.
“Things are desperate,” said Hermeto Paschoalick, the head of critical care unit in the midwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul where such facilities were this week 93% full.
Paschoalick, who works at a public hospital in the city of Dourados, said he had seen his team members shed tears of exhaustion and despair as they battled to cope with the cascade of patients. On Tuesday his 20-bed unit had one free bed – and requests to admit 22 critically ill Covid patients.
“It’s terrifying,” the doctor said, pointing to an even more dramatic situation in Ponta Porã, a town 75 miles down the road on the Paraguayan border, where a hospital with 30 Covid ICU beds was intubating an average of 10 patients a day.
In the state capital, Campo Grande, things were worse still. “I was told yesterday that there’s a health clinic there with 20 ambulances parked outside. The patients are arriving from small towns in the interior and there’s nowhere to put them – so they just keep them in the ambulances,” Paschoalick said. One private hospital had closed its doors because even its casualty department was packed with Covid patients on ventilators.
Danilo Maksud, a cardiologist from São Paulo, said Brazil’s richest and most populous…
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