Grover Ponce, 42, died after being moved from six other fitness services as his circle of relatives watched him with increasing desperation.
by Dan Collyns and Monica Garcia Zea in La Paz
In the two weeks leading up to his death by a suspected Covid-19, Grover Ponce travelled between six hospitals while his wife Paola Medina battled the maze of Bolivia’s fitness care system.
A few days later, although everything was admitted to the Hospital La Portada de La Paz, he had to be rushed to another hospital in El Alto. But until then, it was too late. He suffered two cardiorespiratory stops and died on Sunday.
“I can say a million things, but nothing will bring my husband back,” said Medina, 41, his voice broken as he spoke on the phone from the crowded main cemetery in downtown La Paz.
“Obviously, I feel very, very much with the health care system,” Medina said. “They made things very complicated, and there are a lot of other people like me who didn’t know where to turn.”
Ponce’s death and his wife’s desperate efforts to save his life resonated in Bolivians as his country’s fitness slowed due to an increase in the number of coronavirus cases.
The daily number of new cases peaked on Thursday when the country of 11.5 million reported 75,234 cases and 2,894 deaths; experts suspect that the actual figure is much higher.
A special police unit has collected more than 3,300 bodies from their mendacity or left in the streets, about 80% of which are believed to have been inflamed with Covid-19.
“Sometimes patients have already died when they arrive,” said Norma, an emergency nurse at one of La Paz’s leading public hospitals, who did not want to give the name of his time. “We feel powerless, we can’t give them oxygen because there are many who want it. Watching them die like this is just horrible.
Norma, a mother of three, said she was forced to keep running even though she tested positive for Covid-19. “Eighty percent of us will have to be inflamed now and the worst component is that we move from home and infect our families,” he said.
In desperate, many Bolivians have resorted to home remedies such as the intake of chlorine dioxide, a poisonous disinfectant, to treat the virus. The country’s Ministry of Fitness warned against this, but last month, the opposition-controlled Bolivian congress promoted the chemist and the Senate approved a bill for its manufacture.
The presidential elections, scheduled for the first time in May, have been postponed for the time being, leaving Bolivia’s acting president, Jeanine Oez, in force until the end of the year.
He announced this week that he had recovered from the coronavirus, which has been in the workplace since last year, when Evo Morales was forced to resign amid allegations of voter fraud and fled the country.
“The transitional government has been left with a mediocre fitness system, no financial resources, no equipment, no hospitals and no human resources,” said Dr. Luus Larrea, president of the La Paz branch of the Bolivian Medical Association. .
The La Paz region had 74 extensive care physicians for more than 2 million people, he said.
“They made museums, built great buildings for leaders, but didn’t think about health,” he said.
When Ponce, 42, a driving force of the local government of La Paz, first visited a state social security clinic complaining of fever and cough, he was told he had a bloodless illness, even though such symptoms had sounded the alarm.
The father of three, described as homosexual and charismatic through his colleagues, tried another hospital and then another where he tested, but said the effects would take a week to arrive.
In a fourth hospital, a “quick test” for the coronavirus was negative, but an X-ray of his lungs showed that his condition had severely worsened, Medina said. The doctors who admitted it without delay but there were no beds.
“We didn’t know where to go. We called and called, but there was no post anywhere!” he recalled.
“We spent the night as terrible as possible. We didn’t have oxygen! While her husband was out of breath, her brother controlled to buy a bottle of oxygen, but sold out at 2:30 a.m.
Thanks to a call from Ponce’s boss, he was still admitted to a public hospital last week. But his condition was not much, as he waited days for a plasma donation to recover patients with Covid-19.
Medina went to social media to advocate for plasma donors. He got some answers, but some potential donors looked for piles of dollars for his plasma. Finally, two of them came ahead and looked for nothing to return; however, blood bank tests and clearances took days.
“To this day, we are still waiting … my husband is no longer with us, and I still have no answer,” he says triumphantly.
Finally, on Sunday, a large bed of care was made available in El Alto and Ponce was moved, but died a few hours later.
“He’s my life partner, ” cried Medina. “We have been through many things; smart and bad, we were able to succeed on them, and then all of a sudden he left.”