More patients died in Venezuela due to power outage

CARACAS.- Marielsi Aray was 25 years old. She died in the early hours of Friday after the teams that kept her breathing at the Caracas University Hospital were stopped by the widespread power outage.

Venezuela

which aggravated a critical health situation due to lack of supplies and medicines.

His uncle, José Lugo, was crying in front of the 11-story building until his body was delivered. "The doctors tried to revive it manually, but they decompensated and died at two in the morning," he said.

At that time, they added eight hours of blackout in almost all of Venezuela, the most serious recorded so far in a country where power cuts are frequent, as the government of

Nicolás Maduro

This is attributed to an "electric war", while experts attribute them to a lack of maintenance and investments in infrastructure.

From the moment the electricity was cut off – what the president attributed to sabotage – the ventilators in the intensive care unit where Aray was hospitalized for an infection failed.

"The doctors tried to help him by manually pumping, they did everything they could, but with this lack of electricity, how could they do it?" Her boyfriend and several friends took her to the stairs on the stretcher "in the absence of elevators, Lugo counted.

Outside the University Hospital of Caracas, where, on January 12, two patients also died during a power outage, Gisela Côté is waiting for news of her sister admitted to the emergency room since the morning.

"She has myeloma [un tipo de cáncer en la médula ósea] and she suffered a lot at night, but we could not drive her to the hospital because of the power outage, so we had to wait until dawn, "said Cote, a resident of Petare , the largest favela of Venezuela.

Without refueling

Emilse Arellano feared for the life of the youngest of her five children, who had to undergo dialysis. "There are chaotic services, in others, like nephrology, the supply is more stable," he said.

During the night, the doctors had to light up with mobile phones. "The boys were very scared," he said. "My son needs an urgent dialysis, he does not urinate and he recharges very quickly, he has trouble breathing, they brought four generators, he left alone and he does not have to. has not supplied all the hospital, "warned Arellano.

A rotten smell permeated the entrance to the Bello Monte morgue, the largest in Caracas, where a handful of people await the delivery of the bodies of their loved ones. Many fear that the contamination will spread due to the number of hours without refrigeration.

"We can not receive more corpses," said one of the employees under cover of anonymity. At least 20 bodies have entered the last hours.

"It's the second day I spend here and now, there's no light.If they do not give me the body of my son today, I leave it and it will rot here, it will rot in the cemetery, I will leave it here and I will not come back, "he said. Luis Moisés Guerra, father of Johann, was shot three days ago.

The supreme commander of the maternal hospital Hugo Chávez Frías, in El Valle, was also in the dark yesterday. Only a pregnant woman was waiting on a chair to attend. The others left the center to take an uncertain road to other hospitals in the city. "They told us that they had not practiced caesarean section because the power station was not working and that they did not have any supplies," said another woman.

AFP Agency and El País newspaper