Oxygen scarcity plunges the capital of the Amazon into a Covid nightmare

Sign up here to receive our daily coronavirus newsletter on what you need to know and subscribe to our Covid-19 podcast for the latest news and reviews.

Brazil is one of the nations most affected by the pandemic, but the situation in the Amazon region is even worse. Graves are being hastily dug in irregular rows, hospitals are being invaded, some patients are being taken elsewhere for treatment and there are reports that a recovering patient from Covid-19 was infected again by a more contagious variant that recently appeared in area.

Now, medical facilities in Manaus, the largest city and capital of the state of Amazonas, are dangerously depleted of oxygen after being completely depleted earlier this month. On Wednesday, the Pope said he was praying especially for the people of Manaus. According to a study published in Science in December, about 76% of the city’s population has detectable antibodies, a proportion almost three times greater than the original epicenter of the coronavirus in the country: São Paulo.

Amid a lack of oxygen, hospitals were forced to transfer dozens of premature babies to other states, while the federal government struggled and stumbled to send supplies to the remote region. Celebrities and social media influencers chartered private jets full of tanks to the Amazon, and even Venezuela, the most unstable country in South America, has started sending oxygen trucks across the border.

On the ground, families who need the precious containers struggle to find enough oxygen to keep their loved ones alive. At the northern end of Manaus, inside a little red house facing the rainforest, the Vasconcelos de Jesus family gathers in his son’s room, where two tall green tanks of oxygen keep him alive. Davi Emanuel, 10, is lying in a vegetative state on a bed that his mother decorated with photos of her son on happier days, before 2018, when he contracted the H1N1 virus and was in a coma and dependent on oxygen. Now Davi Emanuel and his parents hired Covid, leaving friends and family running to fill their oxygen cylinders, which run out quickly before the city’s supply runs out.

Vaccines won’t come to the rescue anytime soon. Brazil lags behind neighboring countries in the race to inoculate and Manaus suspended vaccines for 24 hours just three days after the arrival of the first batch, because it was unable to distribute the doses properly.

After several family members fell ill with the virus, Amanda Larrat, 26, helped relatives establish hospital-like environments in their homes, even hiring a private doctor to take care of the group. “I don’t trust the public health system,” she told Bloomberg photographer Jonne Roriz. “I will not let my entire family die.”

Most families in the Amazon, one of the poorest regions in Brazil, do not have the capacity to do the same. In some cases, health professionals have told families of hospitalized patients to wait in line at an oxygen refueling station and carry the containers back to bed. Other families are trying to secure oxygen for home use, hoping to avoid hospitals.

This week, 40-year-old Helmo Queiroz waited in line from 7 am to midnight to refill an oxygen tank for his sister, who was at home sick with Covid. A refueling of the tank in Manaus in early January cost R $ 100 (US $ 18), but with the scarcity, the price increased six times in a week, he said. Queiroz feared that if he took his sister to the hospital, she would die. Charging would only take five hours. “I’ll be back in the morning,” he said.

On the night of January 18, the first vaccines from Covid-19 arrived in Manaus. Vanda Ortega, a 33-year-old indigenous nurse, was the first to be vaccinated. Ortega is a member of Witoto, a tribe of 700 families that is one of the 63 indigenous peoples of Amazonas, the Brazilian state with the largest population of its kind.

During the pandemic, remote indigenous communities struggled for equal access to medical services. Although the state has a special department for indigenous health, resources often go to indigenous territories demarcated in the forest, rather than urban communities like Ortega’s.

She lives in a poor neighborhood of Manaus called Parque das Tribos, with no health post nearby. Ortega spent his free hours transporting medical supplies and equipment to his neighbors, fighting for hospital beds and helping spread information on how to protect against the virus, all wearing a mask that says: “Indigenous lives are important.” She helped the community set up an indigenous hospital, where four infected patients are now in hammocks, in a closed room with an open roof.

The Federal Ministry of Health stated in a note on January 21 that 6 million doses of the Coronavac vaccine made available by the Butantan Institute were being distributed to state and municipal governments “in a proportional and equal way”, but that responsibility for distribution on the ground would fall to the local authorities.

This process has already encountered obstacles.

A few hours after the first vaccines were injected on live TV into the arms of representative patients like Ortega, the children of some wealthy families in Manaus posted on social media that they had also received vaccines. The Amazonas State Court of Auditors is analyzing the matter; its president said on Wednesday that the court “would not allow any kind of political interference in the vaccination campaign” and that anyone caught receiving the vaccine before his turn would be punished.

– With the help of Martha Viotti Beck