RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil continues to accumulate sad records on account of the pandemic. The country is the most affected by covid-19 in South America and the third most infected in the world.
Today, the death toll is 374,000 people and the number of cases is almost 14 million. However, it is the record number of babies killed by the disease that causes most pain among health authorities, who do not know how to stop the tragedy.
According to Dr. Fatima Marinho, senior advisor to the health NGO Vital Strategies, what is happening in the South American giant is unprecedented in any other nation. Official figures from Brazil’s Ministry of Health show that between February 2020 and March 15th, 2021, at least 852 children up to the age of 9 died from covid-19, including 518 infants under the age of 1.
According to Dr. Marinho, it is likely that these numbers are not true and that the total figure is much higher. The expert believes that once the pandemic is over, it will be possible to make real calculations once all the information is available. For the time being, her NGO estimates that there have been more than 2,000 deaths due to covid-19 in children under nine years of age in Brazil, including 1,302 babies, taking into account that many deaths are registered due to unspecified acute respiratory syndrome.
For experts, the reason for this tragedy is a mixture of the new variants in that country, the limited testing of covid for children and the lack of public health policies to prevent the spread of the virus. Although young children are generally at low risk of contracting covid-19, the scale of Brazil’s epidemic has increased the likelihood that younger children will become seriously ill.
The country’s health system is stretched thin, and hospitals have been hit by shortages of basic medicines and oxygen supplies. “The more cases we have and, as a result, the more hospitalizations, the higher the number of deaths in all age groups, including children,” said Renato Kfouri, president of the Brazilian Pediatric Society’s Scientific Department of Immunizations during an interview with the BBC. “But if the pandemic were controlled, this scenario could obviously be minimized,” he explained.
One of the biggest dangers is that, since children are not considered a high-risk population, they are not tested to give them the medical attention they need. Parents also complain about the diagnoses of pediatricians who, not believing that children are vulnerable, make incorrect recommendations and do not refer them to hospitals as they should.
The most affected populations of children are those of African descent and the poor in the favelas. Health professionals say that one of the saddest aspects of this tragedy is that parents are often unable to get close to the children, who end up dying alone and without the embrace of a loved one.
The chaotic management of the Brazilian authorities in dealing with the coronavirus crisis, without “coordinated and centralized” action, plunged the country into a “humanitarian catastrophe”, denounced the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
“The lack of political will to act adequately in the face of this pandemic is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Brazilians,” the organization said in a statement.
In recent weeks, the health crisis has worsened to the point of leaving 66,000 victims of the virus in the month of March alone and an average of 3,000 deaths per day in the last week.
Source: Semana