Via The New York Times, a chronicle of deaths foretold: Puerto Rico’s Health Care Is in Dire Condition, Three Weeks After Maria. My worries about post-Maria leptospirosis have been confirmed. Excerpt and then a comment:
CAGUAS, P.R. — Harry Figueroa, a teacher who went a week without the oxygen that helped him breathe, died here last week at 58. His body went unrefrigerated for so long that the funeral director could not embalm his badly decomposed corpse.
Miguel Bastardo Beroa’s kidneys are failing. His physicians at the intensive care unit at Doctors Hospital in Carolina are treating him for a bacterial disease that he probably caught in floodwaters contaminated with animal urine.
José L. Cruz wakes up in the middle of the night three times a week to secure a spot in line for dialysis. His treatment hours have been cut back to save fuel for the generators that power the center.
“Because of the electricity situation, a lot of people died, and are still dying,” said Mr. Figueroa’s daughter, Lisandra, 30. “You can’t get sick now.”
Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, many sick people across the island remain in mortal peril. The government’s announcements each morning about the recovery effort are often upbeat, but beyond them are hidden emergencies.
Seriously ill dialysis patients across Puerto Rico have seen their treatment hours reduced by 25 percent because the centers still lack a steady supply of diesel to run their generators. Less than half of Puerto Rico’s medical employees have reported to work in the weeks since the storm, federal health officials said.
Hospitals are running low on medicine and high on patients, as they take in the infirm from medical centers where generators failed. A hospital in Humacao had to evacuate 29 patients last Wednesday — including seven in the intensive care unit and a few on the operating table — to an American military medical ship off the coast of Puerto Rico when a generator broke down.
There are urgent attempts to help. The federal government has sent 10 Disaster Medical Assistance Teams of civilian doctors, nurses, paramedics and others to the island. Four mobile hospitals have been set up in hospital parking lots, and the Comfort, a medical treatment ship, is on the scene. A 44-bed hospital will soon open in badly wrecked Humacao, in the southeast.
But even as the Army Corps of Engineers is installing dozens of generators at medical facilities, and utility crews work to restore power to 36 hospitals, medical workers and patients say that an intense medical crisis persists and that communications and electrical difficulties have obscured the true number of fatalities directly related to the hurricane. The official count rose on Tuesday to 43.
Matching resources with needs remains a problem. The Puerto Rico Department of Health has sent just 82 patients to the Comfort over the past six days, even though the ship can serve 250. The Comfort’s 800 medical personnel were treating just seven patients on Monday.
The mayor of Canóvanas, in the northeast part of the island, reported over the weekend that several people in her city had died of leptospirosis, the bacterial disease Mr. Bastardo is believed to have caught from the floodwaters.
The Puerto Rico Department of Health said Sunday night that several cases were being evaluated, but that lab tests had not yet come back to confirm the diagnosis. At the same time, the agency urged people to drink only bottled water and to wear protective shoes near bodies of water that could be contaminated with animal urine.
According to status.pr, as of October 10 16% of the island has electricity; 70 hospitals are operating, but only 25 have electricity; and 46 dialysis centers are in operating, as of October 6.
