Drama in Peru: saturated hospitals and long queues …

From Lima

The nightmare returns. With anguish marked on her face, a woman desperately seeks an intensive care bed for her mother, who urgently needs a ventilator to continue living. Don’t find her. At the door of a hospital, she has already visited several, she asks, begs, in front of the television cameras, for help. Other images show the same drama with different tracks. Once again saturated hospitals, patients who die without being able to be treated, long queues to buy oxygen in private companies They take advantage of the fact that for thousands of people getting it is the difference between living or dying to speculate on its price, while the authorities watch without acting as they say the model defends the free market. Dramatic scenes that shocked the country months ago when the coronavirus pandemic erupted and are now repeating themselves like a returning nightmare.

Peru, one of the countries worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic in the world, is facing a second wave of infections, after about three months of declining cases. The numbers are starting to move closer to the worst time of the pandemic, between July and August of last year, when Peru ranked first in the world for the number of deaths from covid -19 relative to the country’s population. During those months, there were around ten thousand infections and over two hundred deaths per day, which by December had fallen to a daily average of around one thousand infections and fifty deaths. In January, the numbers started to skyrocket. Every day they go up. In the past 24 hours, 5,842 infections and 181 deaths have been reported. According to official data, the total number of cases is 1,093,938 and deaths 39,608, although various specialists indicate that the actual number of deaths is over 85,000. With 1,232 deaths per million inhabitants, according to official data, Peru ranks first in South America in this tragic statistic.

To make it worse Britain’s most aggressive mutation of the virus has been reported in the country. Doctors pointed out that now the health of infected people is deteriorating to a greater extent and faster. The second wave is starting and has already overwhelmed precarious health services, long abandoned by the neoliberal model. There are 10,998 inpatients and 1,779 critically ill patients in intensive care connected to a ventilator, which means 94 percent occupancy of ventilators, of which only 110 are available nationally. But it’s a worldwide number, in various regions, including Lima, the capacity of intensive care units has already been exceeded, there are no free ventilators.

In the midst of a serious political crisis that led the country to have three presidents last November – Martín Vizcarra, sacked by Congress; lawmaker Manuel Merino, who in just six days fell due to massive protests; and the current transitional president, Francisco Sagasti, who will rule until July when whoever is elected in the April elections takes office – the country is behind schedule in negotiations to acquire the expected vaccines. It is only at the end of this month that the first vaccines should arrive, one million doses from the Chinese laboratory Sinopharm.

A few days ago, new restrictions were announced to deal with this second wave, questioned as insufficient by various specialists. The curfew has been extended, which will now begin at 7 p.m. and all day Sunday in seven regions considered to be on “very high alert” (about 25 percent of the population); at 9 pm in twelve other regions on “high alert”, including Lima, where private vehicles cannot circulate on Sundays (63% of Peruvians); and he stays between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. in five areas on “moderate alert”, where there are no other restrictions on Sundays (12 percent of the population).

The beaches have been closed, although surfers are allowed to enter the sea, which has multiplied improvised surfers. Flights from Europe are suspended and every traveler arriving in the country must present a negative molecular test to enter and complete a fourteen-day quarantine.

The government is challenged to keep malls, gyms, casinos and restaurants open despite the arrival of the second wave. The capacity of these spaces varies between 20 and 60 percent, depending on the article and the situation in each region, but there is little capacity to monitor that they are filled.

“The measures taken by the government have been insufficient, late and in some cases inconsistent. It is not understood that Lima, with saturated hospital capacity and a high number of infections, was not classified as a very high alert. Limits are placed on movement within cities, but not on movement between regions of high contagion and low contagion. Tougher restrictions should be put in place, such as targeted quarantines, and spaces such as restaurants, casinos and gyms should be closed. The government has privileged the economy over health ”, declared the former Minister of Health, Víctor Zamora, to PáginaI12, who held the post between March and July, during the first wave of the pandemic, when a general quarantine was put in place.

The dean of the Peruvian Medical College, Miguel Palacios, called the measures adopted by the government “timid”. Palacios, which calls for targeted quarantines, warns that “the speed of this second wave which begins suggests that it will be stronger than the first”. In a message on Twitter, former Health Minister Patricia García wrote: “We are in the second wave, people are dying, there are no intensive care beds. Come back to economic openness now ”.

Responding to the criticism, the President of the Council of Ministers, Violeta Bermúdez, declared that the measures “aim at a balance between the health and the economy of the population”. He said a general quarantine “is impractical for economic reasons”, but did not rule out the possibility of targeted quarantines “if the situation worsens further”. “We hope not to get there,” Bermúdez said.

Former Minister Zamora highlights the impact of the neoliberal model on public services and living conditions as the main reason why Peru is one of the countries most affected by this pandemic. A model which in this crisis has revealed its inequalities and its weaknesses.

“In this second wave,” Zamora says, “we will do just as badly or worse than in the first wave, because although during the first wave we significantly increased the intensive care beds, the health system remains very fragile. , a product of many years of lack of investment and a significant number of the population lives in precarious jobs, in terrible conditions. These are the faces of the neoliberal model, which has operated in the country for 30 years and has shifted the state from a subsidiary role, underfunding services to citizens, such as health. The pandemic has dramatically demonstrated this abandonment of public services ”.