RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – The Amazon city of Manaus began administering vaccines against the coronavirus, providing a ray of hope for the rainforest’s largest city, whose health system is collapsing due to an increase in infections and declining oxygen supplies.
Amazonas state government Wilson Lima led a ceremony Monday night that kick-started the vaccination campaign in Manaus, a remote riverside town of 2.2 million people.
Vanda Ortega, 33, member of Witoto ethnicity and nurse technician, received the first dose of CoronaVac, a vaccine developed by Beijing-based biopharmaceutical company Sinovac.
“I want to thank God and our ancestors,” said Ortega, who is also a volunteer nurse in her native community.
Brazil began rolling out its national immunization program on Monday with 6 million doses of CoronaVac in nearly a dozen states, and hopes to receive 46 million doses to distribute to the states by April. Amazonas received 256,000 doses.
The state government started handing out the doses to municipalities on Tuesday. The priority in the first phase of vaccination will be health workers, the elderly over 80 years old and indigenous people in approximately 265 villages.
According to official figures, Amazonas has registered at least 232,000 cases of the virus since the start of the pandemic. The state is in the midst of a devastating resurgence of infections and a lack of oxygen supply.
Hospitals in Manaus admitted few new COVID-19 patients, causing many to suffer from the disease at home and some to die. And many doctors in Manaus have had to choose which COVID-19 patients can breathe while desperate family members searched for oxygen tanks for their loved ones.
According to officials, the city receives an average of four Brazilian Air Force flights per day to bolster oxygen supplies, along with one shipment per day from the city of Belem near the mouth of the Amazon River.
The government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who regularly criticizes Bolsonaro, authorized the shipment of a caravan of trucks loaded with 107,000 cubic meters (3.78 million cubic feet) of oxygen that the state says will arrive in Amazonas on Tuesday. government.
Even as Amazonas welcomed the support, Bolsonaro criticized Maduro.
“If you want to offer us oxygen, we’ll get it without any problems,” Bolsonaro said Monday. ‘But he (Maduro) could also give emergency aid to his people, couldn’t he? The minimum wage there does not buy half a kilo of rice. “
Brazil’s Ministry of Health on Sunday dispatched seven oxygen plants, which, once installed, will supply oxygen to 100 ICs.
The Amazonas government transferred 18 patients by plane to the state of Goiás on Monday. According to the secretariat of state, the state had already transferred 112 patients for treatment in the federal district, Brasilia and other states.
The collapse of the health system in Manaus, which had already gone through a critical situation last April, generated criticism of the government for allegedly not foreseeing the problems. Thousands of people protested in cities in Brazil on Friday, the same day images surfaced of desperate family members seeking oxygen for loved ones.
Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello admitted Monday that the federal government knew on Jan. 8 that oxygen supplies in the Amazon capital could run out, a week before people died in intensive care beds. The rate of hospital admissions has increased significantly in recent days and made the supplier company unable to meet demand, Pazuello said.
A new strain of the coronavirus is circulating in Manaus. There were concerns about greater transmissibility or the potential for reinfection, although such possibilities remain unproven.
A positive coronavirus test does not reveal which variant of the virus the patient has, but some epidemiologists have speculated that the new species was at least partly responsible for driving the second wave of Manaus.
Jesem Orellana, an epidemiologist at Fiocruz Amazonia public research institute, said the rise in deaths in Manaus is not necessarily due to the new mutation of the coronavirus.
“Since October there has been a problem of overcrowding in hospitals. People don’t arrive early and are hospitalized late, in a more deteriorated state, ”Orellana told The Associated Press.
“A chaotic situation everywhere, the lethality is higher, but not necessarily because of the severity of the infectious agent, but rather because of other factors: there are fewer doctors, health workers are tired, medicines are missing and ICUs are overwhelmed.” Orellana added. “All of this creates a climate that promotes premature death.”
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The Associated Press video journalist Fernando Crispim in Manaus contributed to this report.