Coronavirus in Brazil: cacerolazos against Jair Bols …

Brazil had last night strong pots in protest against President Jair Bolsonaro, given the collapse and lack of oxygen in hospitals in the Amazon city of Manaus, which is experiencing a second wave of coronavirus, and amid the delay in the arrival of covid-19 vaccines

“Go out with Bolsonaro!” Shouted many enraged Brazilians from their windows in different neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo or Brasilia. There has been no such event since mid-2020, when the country crossed the worst moments of the first wave of the pandemic.

he northern state of Amazonas, who in April and May of last year witnessed mass funerals and the collapse of his healthcare system, has been living for a few weeks a new epidemic that has saturated hospitals and depleted oxygen reserves.

Social media images of people transporting tanks to hospitals, stories of doctors having to manually ventilate their patients, and patients dying of suffocation have scandalized the country; Meanwhile, the local government imposed a ten-day curfew in an attempt to contain the situation. This Friday, dozens of people lined up in front of a dispenser in the hope of being able to recharge oxygen bottles for hospitalized relatives.

The Emergency Director of World Health Organization (WHO), Michael Ryan, warned that “If things continue like this, it is clear that we are going to see a wave that will be worse than the catastrophic wave of April and May” in the Amazon region.

The federal government has signaled the shipment of oxygen cylinders and has begun airlifting patients to other states, in an effort to relieve the health care system in the capital Manaus, located deep in the Amazon jungle. Lack of oxygen affects all patients who depend on this intake, not just those hospitalized with covid-19.

This is the case of 61 premature babies who, on the verge of running out of bottles, were going to be transferred to other states, although the Department of Health reported having succeeded in supplying their oxygen reserves to keep them at. Manaus for another 48 hours. A load of 70,000 cubic meters of oxygen arrived this morning from Belém in an attempt to alleviate the situation.

The Bolsonaro administration criticized for inaction. Brazil is the third contagious country, with 8.3 million and 208,000 deaths, 10 percent of the total two million deaths the pandemic has caused so far. The Brazilian president shuns all responsibility and defends the use of drugs whose effectiveness against the disease has not been proven.

No exact date, it is planned to start with the vaccination campaign. The flight which should have taken off yesterday to India to search for two million doses of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine has been postponed “by two or three days”, according to Bolsonaro, due to “political pressure” for the Asian country to give the priority at the start of your own vaccination campaign. The other vaccine that has requested emergency clearance in Brazil is China’s CoronaVac vaccine, the initial six million doses of which have already been imported and are located in São Paulo.

Likewise, various personalities demonstrated on social networks and made their voices heard against the president and the serious situation the country is going through. Among them, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who expressed in a message on his Twitter account his “anguish, concern and indignation” at “the situation of the people of Manaus”.

“Manaus lives a human tragedy unprecedented in its history, announced by the collapse of the health system at the start of this pandemic ”, he added. Lula, who thanked the mobilization of artists, governors of other states and Venezuela, who offered to provide the oxygen that is lacking in hospitals.

“From day one as President of the Republic, Bolsonaro insults artists and culture, governors and the people of Venezuela,” said Lula, who thanked Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for his solidarity.