By Bruno Kelly
MANAUS, Brazil (Reuters) – The Brazilian state of Amazonas is running out of oxygen in the midst of a renewed surge in COVID-19 deaths, its government said on Thursday, as news reports said people on respirators were dying of suffocation in hospitals.
Health authorities in the state capital Manaus said oxygen had run out at some hospitals and intensive care units were so full that scores of patients would be airlifted to six other states.
Governor Nelson Lima announced a 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. statewide curfew to stop the spread of the coronavirus in a devastating second wave that has pushed emergency services to the breaking point.
Brazil is home to the world’s second-deadliest coronavirus outbreak after the United States, and Manaus was one of the first Brazilian cities to creak under a spiraling death count and case load from the first wave of the pandemic last year.
Now, many people are again dying at home from COVID-19.
To make matters worse, a new variant of the virus was detected in Japan on Sunday in four people who had come from Amazonas.
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 for COVID-19 nine months earlier.
The neighboring 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 of the virus.
State health secretary Marcellus Campelo said the state needs almost three times more oxygen that it can produce locally and appealed for supplies from other states.
Public health experts gave dramatic accounts of people dying of COVID-9 in ICUs with no oxygen.
“The oxygen ran out and the hospitals have turned into suffocation chambers,” Fiocruz-Amazonia researcher Jesem Orellana told the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper. “Patients who manage to survive could suffer permanent brain damage,” he said.
(Reporting by Bruno Kelly and Pedro Fonseca Writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
