MANAUS, Brazil (Reuters) – The Brazilian state of Amazonas is running out of oxygen during a further increase in COVID-19 deaths, the government said on Thursday, with the media reporting that people with respirators were dying of suffocation in hospitals.
The state has made a dramatic appeal to the United States to send a military transport plane to the capital Manaus with oxygen cylinders, said Amazonas federal deputy Marcelo Ramos.
“They took my father off oxygen,” said Raissa Floriano in front of the 28 de Agosto hospital in Manaus, where people protested that relatives with severe cases of COVID-19 were being disconnected from ventilators due to lack of oxygen.
Sobbing, Floriano said he was looking for an oxygen cylinder to save his father Alfonso, 73.
Brazil is home to the second most lethal coronavirus outbreak in the world, after the United States, and Manaus was one of the first Brazilian cities hit by an increasing number of deaths and cases from the first wave of the pandemic last year.
With emergency services pushed to the limit, Governor Nelson Lima announced a statewide curfew from 7:00 pm to 6:00 am to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in a devastating second wave.
Health officials said the oxygen supply ran out in some hospitals and the intensive care wards were so full that many patients were being flown to other states.
People in Manaus are dying again at COVID-19.
To make matters worse, a new variant of the virus was detected in Japan on Sunday in four people who came from the Amazon.
The researchers did not establish how infectious or lethal the variant is, but the biomedical center Fiocruz said it detected the virus in a 29-year-old woman who had tested positive nine months earlier.
The neighboring state of Pará announced on Thursday that it was banning tour boats going down the Amazon River, citing an increase in cases and the identification of the new variant.
Amazonas Health Secretary Marcellus Campelo said the state needs almost three times as much oxygen as it can produce locally and ordered supplies from other states.
Public health experts have provided dramatic reports of people dying from COVID-9 in oxygen-free ICUs.
“The oxygen ran out and the hospitals became suffocating chambers,” said Fiocruz-Amazônia researcher Jesem Orellana to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. “Patients who manage to survive can suffer permanent brain damage,” he said.
Reporting by Bruno Kelly, Pedro Fonseca and Ricardo Brito; Written by Anthony Boadle; Edition by Matthew Lewis and Grant McCool