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“Every time you progress … you are repelled by an herb-based or political disaster,” explains Marie Marcelle Deschamps.
Science’s COVID-19 reports are supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
Marie Marcelle Deschamps recalls the first COVID-19 patient who made a stopover at a clinic he runs in Portau-Prince, Haiti. It was the end of March. Its blood oxygen saturation, over 90%, was 35%. The 45-year-old man died in less than an hour. “Oh, my God, ” he recalls telling his colleagues. “He’s here.”
As director of a primary fitness care organization in Haiti, Deschamps was already exhausted by struggles to provide medical care in one of the world’s poorest countries. His clinic soon won thousands of cases of COVID-19 consistent with the week, and his days were faithful to treating patients, according to the consultation of other doctors and sending groups to provide care and recommendations to the inhabitants of Haiti’s slums and rural areas.
Those who have known Deschamps (including this journalist) know her as incredibly warm, bright and charming. Clinic staff, patients, and even strangers greet you tenderly as you hurry. The desire to play a developing role in fitness care in Haiti has long been known as a key to economic development, and after four decades of practicing medicine in their home country, many regard Deschamps as an icon and role model. “It’s inspiring,” says Sandra Lamarque, Haiti’s head of mission for Doctors Without Borders.
Jean William Pape, founding director of GHESKIO, the nonprofit personal fitness organization now run by Deschamps, credits her with the emergence of several systems that have boosted women’s well-being and fitness, adding those who deal with victims of sexual assault: poor consulting women to get microcredits to start businesses or help them send their children to school. “When he commits to solving a problem, it is solved,” says Pape, who now co-directs Haiti’s reaction to COVID-19.
Deschamps to pursue a career in medicine after watching his father die slowly from kidney failure. “I really wanted to be a smart doctor,” he says. The beginning of his career coincided with the massive epidemic in Haiti of the so-called HIV/AIDS disease, before significant treatments existed. She recalls telling her husband, “I give so many death certificates that I hope that one day other people won’t judge me for being a bad doctor.”
At the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis, an organization of Haitian and American doctors chose Deschamps to examine it in the United States, where he made scholarships at Anthony Fauci’s lab at Walter Reed Military Hospital’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Upon her return to Haiti, she and Pape expanded GHESKIO. He went from its humble origins in a small construction across the street from a massive slum known as the City of God to a fitness organization that now treats more Haitians with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis than any other organization in Haiti, as well as other myriad people of other diseases.
Deschamps sees COVID-19 as the latest bankruptcy in the Haitian saga. “Every time you progress, when you find solutions, you’re repelled by a political or herbal disaster,” he says. “You’re in a crisis scenario where you have to act fast.” After the devastating earthquake of 2010, the Deschamps clinic allowed many slum dwellers whose huts had collapsed to camp on their property. She and her colleagues were among the wounded to treat horrific fractures and other injuries.
Shortly after the earthquake, UN troops in Nepal unknowingly brought a cholera epidemic to Haiti that sickened more than 800,000 people and killed more than 10,000 in several years, increasing tension at all Haiti’s fitness facilities, adding Deschamps clinics. “The country has been very vulnerable,” says Deschamps, mentioning threats as varied as political destabilization, the effects of deforestation on agricultural land and sources of drinking water, hurricanes, and an endless procession of infectious diseases. “Now COVID, ” laughs. “Then I thought, what we didn’t see in spite of everything.”
Until Deschamps saw her first COVID-19 patient in late March, Haiti’s poverty and isolation had kept her relatively far from the pandemic. The government had taken precautions through the external airport and the final businesses. Two inflamed travelers, one from the United States and one from Europe, were found and temporarily isolated.
But the patient at her clinic, and others who soon followed her, worked in hotels in the Dominican Republic, which has a porous border with Haiti on Hispaniola Island. Because it is a popular winter tourist destination for others in the northeastern United States and Europe, the Dominican Republic was hit hard and early through COVID-19. More than 30,000 Haitians have lost their jobs there and have been forced to leave their homes or have fled their homes, some bringing with them the virus. Another 300,000 had been displaced by informal work.
For several weeks, Haiti has noticed a large number of cases of COVID-19, exceeding the relatively small number of hospital beds available. Because many Haitians lack shelter, food and medical care, the United Nations Economic and Social Council warned that COVID-19 could cause a humanitarian catastrophe, a theme repeated in a letter co-written through Deschamps and published on June 16 in The New England Journal. Face the Monster in Haiti.
The letter warned that the stigma, once directed at other HIV-positive people, now impedes the attention of others with COVID-19. Health personnel were threatened and stoned. Some patients were driven from their homes and walked away through their relatives, forcing them to live on the street. Deschamps has asked the network’s fitness staff to strive to fight stigma and teach others about protective measures, but recognizes that it is not easy. “How can you ask someone to take appropriate distance measures when five other people live in the same room?”
So far, however, the worst predictions have not been met. While testing and tracking are limited, the official number of instances shown has increased from approximately three hundred by the day to about one hundred to about one hundred in mid-July. As of August 9, Haiti had reported only 183 COVID-1nine deaths in its population of 11.2 million. Deschamps says that even at existing levels, COVID-1nine is a huge burden, but it is “hopeful and skeptical” about the future.
Some other low-income countries have reported similar decreases in cases. Global fitness experts have speculated that these countries can benefit from relatively younger populations, huts that, crowded, are well ventilated or an earlier immune reaction more effective to COVID-19 due to the many other infections other people face. “We just don’t know the reasons for this, but it’s a very intriguing question,” says immunologist Barry Bloom, former Harvard T.H. dean. Chan School of Public Health.
Although he can live and practice medicine anywhere, Deschamps insists he will never leave Haiti. “It’s my place,” he says. Haitians are resilient, he says, despite everything they’ve endured. “Not that we forget … [but] we’re looking for light.”
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