Strained and underfunded fitness systems, economics and incorrect information have led to an increase in the number of deaths.
Cold, tired and desperate parents camping out in the open at Asunción’s Barrio Obrero General Hospital don’t want graphs or data sets to verify what they can see with their own eyes.
With Paraguay recording the highest proportion of covid deaths in the world, overcrowded families await news of their loved ones, and sudden demands for medicines and materials that the country’s chronically insufficient fitness formula cannot provide.
“There’s really so little from government, it’s a mess,” said Jessica Ortigosa, whose father languished in a chair instead of a bed. “They deserve to have been preparing for all of this since the beginning of the pandemic. “
As he spoke, two collapsed on a couch at the front of the hospital, their uncontrollable tears heralding the death of Paraguay’s latest coronavirus victim.
Natalia Bernal, who is nearby, relieved to be able to leave the brave face she had just shown for her mother, who intubated in the hospital a day after losing her husband to Covid.
“I couldn’t let my mom see me in the state I was in,” Bernal said. Still, he added, at least his mom had a bed.
“We needed extensive care for my father and there was none. There simply is none.
On Wednesday of this week, Paraguay recorded 18. 09 deaths consisting of millions, to 2. 71 in India, 2. 2 in South Africa, 1. 01 in the United States and 0. 14 in the United Kingdom.
And as the U. S. As the U. S. and Europe begin to emerge from the pandemic, take off their masks and think about how to spend stimulus funds, the maximum apparent crisis in Paraguay is unfolding across much of South America.
India may have captured much of the world’s attention in recent weeks, but Paraguay, Suriname, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil and Peru are suffering, in that order, the silent annihilation of Covid like nowhere else in the world. Even in Peru, seventh, the number of deaths consistent with millions stands at 9. 12, more than 3 times the figure recorded in India.
In the early months of the pandemic, Paraguay and neighboring Uruguay were hailed as Latin America’s most notable achievements in Covid management.
But since March, both countries have noted an explosion of the disease, largely attributed to the competitive Brazilian variant that has torn much of South America apart, and a decline in compliance with social distancing measures.
In Uruguay, not even one of the fastest vaccination systems in Latin America has been able to contain the spread. Paraguay, meanwhile, has faced persistent emergency under the pressure of entrenched poverty, a traditionally underfunded fitness system and many questions about government corruption. Anger and frustration sparked street protests earlier this year and a manslaughter case was opened against the government at the prosecutor’s office.
Argentina also stood out as a model, with few cases at the beginning of the pandemic when the government imposed heavy restrictions that were acknowledged by the public.
But this situation has dramatically replaced. Covid has Argentina’s smartest killer, far surpassing core disease and cancer and averaging 528 deaths per day over the past two weeks.
Vanina Edul, an intensive care doctor in Buenos Aires, says the lack of such scenes seen in some countries during the first wave of the pandemic is misleading: “What generates the perception that fitness collapses is when other people die at home or on the street. “, however, in Argentina, other people die behind closed doors in covid wards, so covid deaths remain invisible and almost unreal. Chronic social and economic disruptions play a role in the higher covid death rate. In the last decade, our inflation rate is one of the highest in the world, so why do we deserve to expect that we will suddenly become geniuses facing a calamity like this?” he asks.
Tensions between progressive Peronists in power, who supported science but allowed their classic populist reflexes to influence decisions, and the pro-business opposition Together for Change, with its denialist tendencies, helped.
Earlier this week, the government announced a revision of the country’s fitness formula to integrate public and personal fitness care, a move Belocoppitt likens to “revamping its military in the midst of a war. “
And yet, Argentines remain positive, and largely unaware of the higher death rate, as news drowns out in the country’s complex political dispute. Argentina’s vaccination program is in full swing and the vaccination menu has diversified with Sputnik, Sinopharm and AstraZeneca. as the main vaccines administered. Almost 40% of the population has won at least one hit and only about 8% two strokes so far.
While a lack of investment, the economy, new variants and slow vaccination programs explain much of the region’s current crisis, so do many of its politicians. And no leader on the continent faces such a damning record as Jair Bolsonaro’s.
Brazil, on the verge of reaching the horrific milestone of 500,000 deaths, has been led by a president who has called the coronavirus a “little flu,” resisted lockdown methods and been fined last weekend for not wearing a mask at a motorcycle rally in São Paulo. He is now under investigation through a congressional investigation into his calamitous reaction to the public fitness emergency.
People involved in the Covid reaction, including representatives of pharmaceutical corporations, told the investigation that the Bolsonaro administration rejected donations to get the vaccine last year. The country has been controlled to immunize only 11. 4% of its 212 million citizens.
Worse, acceptance of the vaccine has been hampered by Bolsonaro’s fiercely anti-scientific stance.
“The biggest one in Brazil, and the one that has a terrible effect on vaccine intake, is denial in politics,” said Chrystina Barros, a member of the Covid-19 organization at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
“We have a denialist president whose rhetoric and habit run counter to medical advice, and who urges others not to get vaccinated. It’s a big storm.
With an average of 2,000 deaths a day, Brazil is isolated in the world. Several countries — in addition to neighboring Argentina — limit access to Brazilian passengers, and the country is subject to foreign opprobrium.
“If Brazil doesn’t take the pandemic seriously, it will continue to affect the entire community there and beyond,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said last March. “It’s not just about Brazil. “
Political turmoil, to mention decades of underinvestment in public health care, has also wreaked havoc on neighboring Peru.
Hector Araújo, a 51-year-old nutritionist who worked at a nursing home in downtown Lima, died fifteen days after being diagnosed with Covid. He is survived by 3 young people aged 18, 16 and 10.
“He died from the inefficiency of the fitness system,” said his younger sister, Patty. “Then the disease devoured him. “
Despite his social security contributions, Hector Araujo spent 10 days in intensive care at a hospital that lacked care for confusing cases.
“My brother needed 24-hour care with specialists and an extensive care facility that they couldn’t give him,” Araujo said.
She, like tens of thousands of mourning Peruvians, is furious with successive governments that have invested a tiny percentage of GDP in the fitness formula — less than the share of what neighboring countries have invested in public fitness — despite two decades of strong economic growth. .
Days before a deeply divided runoff between two candidates at opposite ends of the political spectrum, a government review showed what Peruvians had long suspected: the country’s actual number of COVID-19 deaths at 180,764, nearly triple the official death toll of 69,342. The revision of delinquency made Peru the country with the highest constant per capita mortality rate in the world.
Peru may have imposed one of Latin America’s oldest and strictest lockdowns in March 2020, but high informality, overcrowded households, and even grocery buying behavior have meant the measures have failed to reduce infections.
Vaccine rollout has been slow and the wave of the virus has been worse than the first, forcing Peru into another severe lockdown after a surge in infections pushed hospitals to the brink of collapse. saw 3 presidents in one week last year, and the scenario didn’t help with the revelation in February that former leader Martin Vizcarra and nearly 500 others had been secretly vaccinated.
An interim government has restarted the vaccination crusade and some 2 million Peruvians, 7% of the population, have already been vaccinated.
The death rate, which peaked in April, has slowly declined, pain and anger remain.
“The strange thing about this pandemic is that not all the dead have entered,” Araújo said. “Sometimes I think it’s all a bad dream. “
Jessica Ortigosa sees little chance of the nightmare ending quickly as she waits for news of her father and wonders if she’ll swap her chair for a bed.
“That’s right,” he said amid the cold, tears and hugs at the doors of the Barrio Obrero General Hospital. “Here it is like this every day. Every day. “