COVID leaves Amazon city struggling to breathe

For several weeks early last year, and again in January and February this year, Manaus became the horror story that health experts warn about when they urge people to stick to lockdowns, face masks and social distancing

BRAZIL

The hardest thing about caring for eight relatives with COVID-19 at the same time, says Brazilian student Lais de Souza Chaves, was deciding who got oxygen.

The pandemic had so overwhelmed their city, Manaus, that it ran out of hospital beds and medical oxygen — leaving Lais, 25, and her sister Laura, 23, to set up a makeshift intensive care unit at home, with no medical training.

After joining countless others facing the same situation in a desperate hunt for oxygen, they would rotate their precious supply to whoever seemed most in danger of asphyxiating to death.

Learning as they went to install airflow regulators, tubes and gauges, the sisters would switch the oxygen supply without telling their relatives, to avoid making the situation worse, they said.

“I have a panic attack if someone says the word oxygen. My whole body shudders,” Lais told AFP.

For several weeks in April and May last year, and again in January and February this year, Manaus became the horror story that health experts and political leaders around the world warn about when they urge people to stick to lockdowns, face masks and social distancing.

The northern city, known as the unofficial capital of the Amazon rainforest, was hit so hard by the surge of COVID-19 that it had to resort to mass graves and refrigerated trucks to deal with the overflow cadavers. The first wave was so bad some researchers hypothesized when it tapered that the city of 2.2 million people had reached herd immunity.

Then the second wave hit, and shattered that hope.