The state of Amazonas in Brazil is running out of oxygen during a renewed surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths, its government says, with media reporting that people on respirators were dying of suffocation in hospitals.
The state has made a dramatic appeal to the United States to send a military transport plane to the capital city of Manaus with oxygen cylinders, Amazonas congressman Marcelo Ramos said.
“They took my father off the oxygen,” Raissa Floriano said outside the 28 de Agosto hospital in Manaus, where people said that relatives suffering serious cases of COVID-19 were being unhooked from ventilators for lack of oxygen.
Sobbing, Ms Floriano said she was looking for an oxygen cylinder to save her 73-year-old father Alfonso.
The city has "run out of oxygen and some health centres have become a type of suffocation chamber," Jessem Orellana, from the Fiocruz-Amazonia scientific investigation institute, said.
Workers carry oxygen cylinders at the Getulio Vargas University Hospital, in Manaus, Brazil, 14 January 2021. Source: EFE
"Here, there aren't any empty beds left, any oxygen tanks, nothing - all we have left is faith," Manaus resident Luiza Castro told AFP.
Brazil is home to the world’s second-deadliest COVID-19 outbreak after the United States, and Manaus was one of the first Brazilian cities struck by a spiraling death count and caseload from the first wave of the pandemic last year.
With emergency services pushed to breaking point, Amazonas Governor Wilson Lima announced a 10-day statewide curfew on Thursday to stop the virus spread.
He said the state was "in the most critical moment of the pandemic".
"These are difficult but necessary measures," he said. "We are in a war operation."
Health authorities say some intensive care wards are so full that scores of patients were being airlifted to other states.
People in Manaus are again dying at home from COVID-19, and according to official figures, the city on Wednesday saw a fourth straight day of record burials - 198, with 87 of them deaths from the virus.
To make matters worse, a new variant of the virus was detected in Japan on Sunday in four people who had come from Amazonas.
An aerial view of the burial site reserved for victims of the COVID-19 pandemic at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery in Manaus Source: AFP
Researchers have not established how infectious or lethal the variant is, but biomedical center Fiocruz said it had detected the virus in a 29-year-old woman who had already tested positive nine months earlier.
The neighbouring state of Pará announced on Thursday it was banning travel boats coming down the river from Amazonas, citing a rise in cases and the identification of the new variant.
Britain on Thursday also said it was suspending all arrivals from South America due to the variant.
Amazonas Health Secretary Marcellus Campelo said the state needs almost three times more oxygen than it can produce locally and appealed for supplies from other states.
With AFP.
