Tegucigalpa.
Doctors of Honduras They held a sit-in in several cities across the country on Saturday to demand that all health workers be urgently provided with individual protective equipment to prevent Covid-19 contamination, which has claimed the lives of more than 100 professionals, and to have access to it. vaccine.
In the country “everything has been a fiasco, here were no drugs, fans, we don’t know what the fans they bought are made of, poor quality masks, why are we going to believe they are going to bring us a vaccine?” He emphasized the president of journalists Honduras Medical College (CMH), Suyapa Figueroa.
He noted that doctors don’t believe “this Government looters it’s going to do something for the benefit of the people or the health sector, this is really a government of criminals, we don’t believe anything at all. “
Figueroa, along with other doctors, today took part in a CMH sit-in near the mobile hospital in Tegucigalpa, the purchase of which, he said, is “an ongoing scam” against the Honduran people.
The Honduran government purchased seven mobile hospitals in Turkey for $ 47.4 million between March and April 2020, but only two are in operation so far, one in Tegucigalpa and the other in San Pedro Sula, in the north of the country.
The remaining five hospitals will serve hospitals in the southern, eastern, western and Caribbean regions of the country, although it is not known when.
According to the CMH, the National Anticorruption Council (CNA) and the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ), the purchase of the seven hospital units, which apparently arrived with errors and used and expired equipment, was corruption.
Working in mobile hospitals is ‘signing your death’
Given the inability of those dealing with the situation (van pandemicI think there are legitimately no guarantees of care in health centers, and if they are going to force people to work on these cans, these containers (mobile hospitals) then people are not willing to work because they know what it is to sign their deaths, ”Figueroa stressed.
He assured that working in mobile hospitals’ is to make sure they contract the infection because they are not used to treating patients with COVID-19“.
In recent weeks, Honduras has recorded a high incidence of infections and deaths from the coronavirus, a disease that has claimed the lives of at least 72 doctors and some 40 nurses.
The doctors also demanded “the departure” of the Honduran Minister of Health, Alba Consuelo Flores, and members of the Multisectoral table given that it “reinforces the actions of the government” and furthermore “they only represent the interests of privileged sectors and groups”.
Figueroa recalled the state’s “constitutional mandate” to guarantee the covid-19 vaccine for the entire population.
“The Honduran people have to get up and be with us to demand vaccines, or we’ll die without anything happening here unless international agencies come to the violation of human rights that happens in the country, ”emphasized the chairman of the CMH.
Pandemic got out of hand
“The epidemic has gotten out of hand, the measures taken by the government are not correct, on the contrary, they go against what science dictates is the right thing to do in an epidemic,” said Balbino Cárcamo, one of the doctors who took part in the sit-in in front of the Hospital de Occidente.
He condemned that hospitals do not have “adequate equipment” to care for patients and “much less for the protection of health personnel”.
“The government has shamelessly got us into the issue of vaccines” against Covid-19, said the specialist, lamenting that candidates for popular positions continue to call for conversion activities amid the health emergency.
Cárcamo called politicians who call their activists to political rallies “irresponsible” because of the risk of becoming infected. coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, giving covid-19.
The specialist recalled that his partner Karen Tábora, also a doctor, died in Tegucigalpa last Friday after becoming infected with the corona virus.