Hospitals are swamped in Latin American cities facing surging number of coronavirus cases outside the region's hot spots. Some places don't have enough ventilators and are preparing for a wave of deaths.
People infected with COVID-19 disease wait for an available bed, outside a public hospital in Lima, Peru, Thursday, April 30, 2020.
“We’re in bad shape,” said Pilar Mazzetti, head of the Peruvian government’s COVID-19 task force. “This is war.” He warned that authorities need to maintain anti-virus restrictions even as the U.S. and Europe reopen. Some of the hardest-hit cities, like Lima and Santiago, imposed strict, early lockdowns. But officials have struggled to enforce them, whether among the wealthy who are used to flouting regulations or lower-income people who depend on day labor or selling things on the street to feed their families.
“I have a 26-year-old woman next to me who walked in. Three hours later, she’s suffocating because we don’t have a respirator available,″ said an intensive care doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to the media. “I think we’re getting to the point that you saw in Europe, where people died for lack of respirators.”
Under the new restrictions, people will have to receive a police permit to leave home, with violators fined the equivalent of thousands of dollars. Essential workers are exempted.
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