Via The Guardian: Cuba’s health system buckles under strain of overwhelming Covid surge. Excerpt:
Julia, a community doctor in Havana, was drafted to the intensive care unit soon after Covid-19 first reached Cuba.
Last week, her cousin died from the virus. This week, she also tested positive amid a surge in cases which has pushed the island’s vaunted health service to its limits and prompted rare public criticism from Cuban doctors.
“It hurts to see people die from this terrible virus,” she said, recovering at home from nausea after being injected with an immune booster. “The mood among doctors gets worse by the day.”
After recording one of the world’s lowest Covid rates last year, Cuba now has one of the western hemisphere’s highest. The island, which reported 12,225 confirmed cases in all of 2020, has reported almost 50 times that so far this year. And with the Delta variant having taken root, a lack of medical supplies is crippling the medical response.
“There are no antibiotics, no painkillers, the basic list of medicines is almost all out of stock,” said Daniela, a family doctor in Havana who has hardly had a day off since the pandemic began.
In the face of extreme scarcity, doctors are increasingly prescribing herbal remedies. Mortuaries are overwhelmed. The country’s main oxygen factory recently broke down, compounding the intensive care crisis.
Cuba last year hospitalised everybody who tested positive for Covid, including asymptomatic cases. But even for a country with the world’s highest doctor-to-patient ratio, average daily case loads of 9,000 have made that protocol unworkable. Now children, the elderly, pregnant women and severe cases are hospitalised, while others must isolate at home.
Hundreds of doctors have been brought back from international “missions” abroad – a major hard currency generator for the state – to support exhausted colleagues. But the move has not been enough to stop the system, which last year was a model of test, track and isolate, from fraying.
