In Guayaquil, the ghosts of the coronavirus hover over the city
In the second city of Ecuador, at the end of March, 450 bodies were waiting to be taken over by the police. A “corpses crisis” which testifies to an outdated health system and an organization as risky as it is sometimes corrupt. On the Latin American platform Connectas, a journalist living in Guayaquil recounts.
When President [Ecuadorian] Lenín Moreno announced the state of emergency on March 16, we naively believed that we would be able to stop this virus in time, the ravages of which we were observing from afar. At that time, 58 cases of coronavirus had been confirmed [in Ecuador] and the first two deaths recorded. Figures far from those of Spain, which two days earlier had declared a state of alert with 6 cases of Covid-391 and 19 deaths.
The first victim in Ecuador was a 71-year-old woman, returned from Spain, tested positive for Covid-19 on February 29, who then fought the virus for two weeks in the ICU. Guasmo hospital, in Guayaquil, before dying. We thought we would be safe. But it was probably a mistake to compare ourselves to Spain.
Pauper's grave
Right now, Guayaquil, where I've been living for fourteen years, is making international headlines because of the “corpses crisis” and the catastrophic management of the bodies of people who, by the dozen, began to die at they.
Also read Panic. In Ecuador, corpses in the streets of Guayaquil
It is an additional symptom of the incompetence of the authorities and the collapse of our health system. At the end of March, 450 bodies were waiting to be taken in charge by the forensic police service. Admittedly, not all of these people had died from Covid-19, but because of the symptoms presented, it can be assumed that a large number of them had been infected.
To cope with the most urgent, the government and municipal officials have considered the possibility of opening a mass grave, an idea which caused some discomfort and which was then rejected by the president. The latter pleaded in favor of dignified and individual burials, while leaving this question open: but when?
This mass grave, which never saw the light of day, responded to a tragic reality: many people were left to their own devices and died at home.
Ecuador, regional epicenter of the virus
Their loved ones cannot cry for them, because they must bury them as quickly as possible to avoid the smell of decomposing bodies. It is also this reason which led many of them to take the dead on the sidewalks, at the risk of contracting the deadly virus.
And since bad news never comes alone, some people cannot even say goodbye, because the bodies have disappeared. This is the case of the family of pediatric surgeon Rodolfo Vanegas, who caught the coronavirus at Teófilo Dávila hospital in the city of Machala, and died on March 28. Her children cannot grieve because no one knows where her body is. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case, according to the Latin American platform Connectas.
The majority of people who have died in the past few days did not know if they were infected with the coronavirus. Before their deaths, many had tried unsuccessfully to contact the emergency telephone line set up on February 29 so that they could be tested.
Because yes, this system has also shown its limits. Although Ecuador is the epicenter of the virus at the regional level, [at the beginning of April,] only 9 tests [019 to April 32] had been carried out against 000 in Peru and 21 in Chile.
Guayaquil, a warm city
How not to worry when you see endless queues in front of the rare private laboratories authorized to carry out tests at Covid-19? (It will cost you 80 dollars if the prescription comes from a public doctor and 120 dollars if it is a private doctor.) How not to be seized by anxiety when your close friends tell you about their journey through hospitals to get treatment?
Journalists are not immune, and although there is no official count of the number of those infected, we know there have been at least four deaths [among them]. Added to this is the frustration of participating in “virtual press conferences” where the authorities do little or nothing to answer our questions.
Guayaquil is the second city of Ecuador, the main port of the country and its economic lung. It is a warm city, where you eat well and where the social contrasts are enormous. The coronavirus certainly hit the poor mostly, but it didn't spare the wealthy.
Samborondón, which has 102 inhabitants and is separated from Guayaquil by a bridge, is the most contaminated city in relation to the number of inhabitants. It is in this miniature Miami that the richest live, who decided to cross the river to confine themselves in their houses lined with palm trees.
Bribes and corruption
The summer holidays, which had started at the end of January, with the trips abroad, were fatal since they undoubtedly caused a large number of contaminations, even if one will never be able to prove it.
In the midst of a health emergency, all kinds of unimaginable things happened. In particular the blocking of the runway at Guayaquil airport, ordered by the mayor, Cynthia Viteri, to prevent the landing of a humanitarian flight sent empty from Madrid to repatriate the Europeans stranded by the stop of air traffic.
Viteri justified his decision by the presence of eleven crew members and stressed that she wanted to protect the city, even if two weeks before she had done nothing to prevent the holding of a football match with FC Barcelona, the most popular team in the country.
This decision was barely contested by the Minister of the Interior, María P. Romo, who took the opportunity to wish the mayor a speedy recovery, diagnosed in record time as positive at Covid-19.
In such a context, all that was missing was corruption, which, as always, is grafted onto the misfortune of others. The Ecuadorian Social Security Institute (IESS), through its former director general, wanted to order medical supplies for an amount of 10 million dollars (by invoicing the state for N95 masks 12 dollars each, while their market price is $ 1,80).
Ridiculous statistics
This scandal, revealed by social networks and taken up by various media, aroused such indignation in the country that the order was canceled. Perhaps our country would be better off if citizens controlled public spending, or at least if they echoed journalists' denunciations.
What is happening in Guayaquil and Ecuador could serve as an example for other countries in the region which may have compared themselves to Spain and Italy, where, despite the crisis, people had access to services hospitable.
Also read The figure of the day. Covid-19 causes unprecedented excess mortality in Spain
We have no shortage of hospitals in Guayaquil: there are several private hospitals as well as those of the Junta de Beneficencia, and three large public hospitals have been built in recent years. Guayas, the province to which Guayaquil belongs, has 5 beds out of the 857 in our national health system, according to 23 figures, and we are in the process of creating more. But this is not enough.
Meanwhile, the number of deaths is soaring and the numbers raise many questions [the number of deaths increased by 299% in the first fortnight of April and 152% in March, compared to February 2020].
The statistics on the number of deaths have started to seem ridiculous compared to the tragedy [in particular of the number of people dying at their home] which was knotted in the main port of the country. So much so that the government has added, in small print, in its health report, the number of “deaths probably linked to Covid-19”.
Even so, the figures “don't reflect the situation,” admitted President Moreno, who proposed making them more transparent, as painful as they are. The worst is yet to come, and in Guayas, home of the contagion, the authorities already estimate the number of deaths due to the pandemic at 3.
Daniela Aguilar
https://www.courrierinternational.com/a ... r-la-ville
