Brazilian state of Amazonas runs out of oxygen as COVID-19 rises

MANAUS, Brazil (Reuters) – The Brazilian state of Amazonas runs out of oxygen amid a further rise in deaths from COVID-19, its government said Thursday, media reporting that people on ventilators were dying of suffocation in hospitals.

The state has made a dramatic appeal to the United States to send a military transport plane to Manaus, the capital, with oxygen cylinders, Amazonas congressman Marcelo Ramos said.

“They took my father off oxygen,” Raïssa Floriano said outside Hospital 28 de Agosto in Manaus, where people protested that relatives with severe cases of COVID-19 were being taken down from ventilators for lack of oxygen.

Weeping, Floriano said she was looking for an oxygen cylinder to save her father Alfonso, 73.

Brazil is home to the world’s second deadliest coronavirus epidemic after the United States, and Manaus was one of the first Brazilian cities to be hit by an increase in death toll and case load since the first wave of the pandemic last year.

With emergency services being pushed to breaking point, Governor Nelson Lima announced a statewide curfew from 7:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. to stop the spread of the coronavirus in a devastating second wave.

Health officials said oxygen supplies were depleted in some hospitals and intensive care units were so full that dozens of patients were being airlifted to other states.

Residents of Manaus are dying again in their homes from COVID-19.

To make matters worse, a new variant of the virus was detected in Japan on Sunday in four people from Amazonas.

Researchers have not established how infectious or deadly the variant is, but the Fiocruz biomedical center said it detected the virus in a 29-year-old woman who had already tested positive nine months earlier.

The neighboring state of Pará announced on Thursday that it was banning travel boats down the Amazonas River, citing an increase in cases and identification of the new variant.

Amazonas Health Secretary Marcellus Campelo said the state needs nearly three times as much oxygen as it can produce locally and has drawn on supplies from other states.

Public health experts have given dramatic accounts of people dying from COVID-9 in intensive care units without oxygen.

“The oxygen ran out and hospitals turned into suffocation chambers,” Fiocruz-Amazonia researcher Jesem Orellana told the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. “Patients who manage to survive could suffer permanent brain damage,” he said.