Via The Guardian: 'Just unimaginable': Latin America's Covid crisis heads from bad to worse. Excerpt:
As the coronavirus epidemic hammered Rio earlier this year, frontline doctor Clarisse Bressan recalls fleeing to her hospital’s toilet to shed surreptitious tears of exhaustion and fear.
“I lost a colleague who was my resident, someone younger than me, a newlywed,” said the 43-year-old tropical medicine specialist. “It’s a disaster – just unimaginable, a nightmare.”
Ten months and nearly 180,000 Brazilian deaths later, Bressan said she felt anger as she watched cities reopen, bars, restaurants and gyms pack, and her intensive care unit once again fill with wheezing, panicked patients unsure if they would survive.
“I feel like a schmuck, a total schmuck. For Pete’s sake! It’s like I’m the only one who’s worried,” complained the doctor from Rio’s Fiocruz coronavirus hospital which opened its doors in May.
The Brazilian city is far from the only part of Latin America – where more than 460,000 lives have already been lost – facing what many call a second Covid wave.
In Mexico, which with over 110,000 fatalities has the world’s fourth highest death toll, the World Health Organization (WHO) last week warned of a “very worrisome” situation after the number of weekly deaths doubled between mid-October and late November.
“Mexico is in bad shape,” the WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared.
Issac Chávez Díaz, an anaesthetist from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, said he feared the relaxation of containment measures meant the coming peak could be even higher than the first one in July.
“We’re probably going to see the worst in December and January,” Chávez Díaz predicted.
In Paraguay, which won early plaudits for its proactive pandemic response, authorities this week tightened restrictions after a jump in infections. Following an encouraging drop in late October, recent weeks have seen daily figures return to almost their highest point since the pandemic began, topping 1,000 daily infections for the first time since 1 October.
“There’s been an excessive increase in cases,” said Fabián Ojeda, the municipal chief of staff in the Paraguayan city of Pilar which declared a 15-day health emergency on 1 December. “Our local health system wasn’t reinforced like it was in other places – it’s not far from collapse.”
Last week Chile’s health minister, Enrique Paris, admitted he was also bracing for a possible new wave of infections in January that could hit “with much greater force than the first”.
