Brazil’s healthcare system plunged into the most serious crisis in its history, with overworked doctors and patients dying while waiting for intensive care beds, while skeptical Covid president Jair Bolsonaro continued to reject calls for a life-saving blockade. .
As the daily number of infections and deaths reached new heights this week, researchers at the main health institute in Brazil, Fiocruz, said that the largest country in South America faces an unparalleled “catastrophe”.
Covid’s intensive care units in virtually all 26 states in Brazil and the federal district that contains the capital, Brasilia, are now at maximum or dangerously close capacity, said the institute, warning: “The situation is absolutely critical”.
Brazil’s far-right leader and his allies continue to downplay an outbreak that killed more than 287,000 people, the second largest number on Earth, and, partly as a result of the most contagious P1 variant, is now accelerating to its deadliest state phase.
“Our situation is not so critical. Compared to other countries, it is quite comfortable, ”said Ricardo Barros, Bolsonaro’s leader in the lower house, on Wednesday, when 2,798 deaths and a record 90,830 new cases were recorded.
But interviews with intensive care physicians in four of the most affected states – Mato Grosso do Sul, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo – denied this statement.
“Things are desperate,” said Hermeto Paschoalick, head of the intensive care unit in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where such facilities were 93% full this week.
Paschoalick, who works at a public hospital in the city of Dourados, said he saw his members shed tears of tiredness and despair as they struggled to cope with the cascade of patients. As of Tuesday, his 20-bed unit had a free bed – and requests to admit 22 patients with Covid in critical condition.
“It’s scary,” said the doctor, pointing to an even more dramatic situation in Ponta Porã, a city 120 kilometers on the border with Paraguay, where a hospital with 30 ICU beds in Covid intubated an average of 10 patients a day.
In the state capital, Campo Grande, things were even worse. “I was told yesterday that there is a health post there with 20 ambulances parked outside. Patients are arriving from small rural towns and there is nowhere to put them – so they just keep them in ambulances, ”said Paschoalick. A private hospital closed its doors because even the emergency department was packed with Covid patients on ventilators.
Danilo Maksud, a cardiologist from São Paulo, said that the richest and most populous state in Brazil – where ICUs were 89% full with more than 11,000 Covid patients – was in similar trouble. “It is not chaos – we are far beyond chaos,” admitted the 39-year-old doctor, who said that all 20 beds in his ICU were occupied after a month-long increase in hospitalizations.
Maksud suggested that a “complete blockade” was probably the only way to stop the violence from the virus, although Bolsonaro resisted that idea, apparently fearful of the impact it could have on the economy and his hopes of re-election next year. With 212 million inhabitants, Brazil is home to 2.7% of the world population, but has suffered more than 10% of deaths in Covid.
“I don’t know if I ever imagined that we would face a moment like this,” reflected Maksud on Wednesday, after São Paulo suffered a record 679 deaths in one day. “It’s like we’re stuck in a hole and the walls are closing in on us.”
A thousand kilometers away, in the northeast of the state of Pernambuco, where the ICUs were 96% occupied, the story was the same, with Covid hitting practically all over the country simultaneously.
“People are walking around saying that Brazil is going to collapse,” said intensive care doctor Pedro Carvalho on Thursday morning, as he began another 12-hour shift at a university hospital in the riverside city of Petrolina.
“But we already collapsed – we collapsed completely,” said Carvalho, 41, whose hospital added 10 new ICU beds on Monday morning and filled them until sunset.
The doctor countered Bolsonaro’s ally’s claims that Brazilian hospitals were feeling comfortable. “To call it false news would be very kind. It is just a complete lie. They know how bad things are, ”complained Carvalho.
He added: “I would like to invite these deniers to come and cover some shifts in our ICU – not actually treating patients, of course, but helping us to inform families that their loved ones have died. Maybe then they will stop lying. “
Anguishing stories of lives that ended suddenly and unnecessarily emerged from each of the ICUs. Paschoalick said that most of the people in his care were over 60, but young people were also dying. “At the moment, I have three people using ventilators, including a 22-year-old woman and a 25-year-old woman. Both were pregnant when they arrived. One lost the baby, the other managed to give birth. Both are intubated and in very bad shape, ”he said.
André Machado, a doctor at Covid in Rio Grande do Sul, where intensive care units are 100% full, said his hospital was so overloaded that he needed to choose who would have a chance to survive intensive care. “Today, 49 patients are in the emergency room waiting for an ICU bed,” he said Thursday morning. There was room for only four.
Maksud, who works at the Santa Casa de Misericórdia in São Paulo, said he was not yet being forced to play God, but he had friends elsewhere taking these calls and suspects that “rock bottom” will soon come to him as well.
“I’m scared, scared of what might happen next,” he said, as his country looked into the abyss.