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Brazil has begun distributing an emergency batch of intubation drugs arriving from China, and hospitals across the country are running out of vital supplies to treat Covid-19 patients with ventilators.
As it faces a second wave of coronavirus that is more deadly than the first, the largest nation in Latin America is struggling to get drugs for sedative people who need invasive mechanical respiratory support.
The situation has sparked fear among medical professionals that patients might wake up while they were still intubated.
A first shipment of 2.3 m intubation “kits,” containing sedatives, muscle neuroblockers and painkillers made in China, landed in São Paulo on Thursday evening. A group of companies, such as Petrobras, Vale, Engie, Itaú Unibanco, Klabin and Raízen, bought and donated to Brazil’s public health system. New equipment of 1.1 million is expected by the end of the month.
The shortage is due to Brazil’s difficulties in obtaining adequate doses and ingredients for the vaccine, while at the beginning of the year the oxygen containers had to be moved to the Amazonian city of Manaus after having been overwhelmed by an explosion of Covid-19 infections.
Following criticism of President Jair Bolsonaro’s response to the pandemic, the country’s Senate this week launched an investigation into its administration’s treatment of the coronavirus crisis.
So far, 365,000 people have died from the disease in Brazil, the second death toll after the United States, or the eleventh per capita.
The latest government data showed that new cases of Covid-19 decreased slightly to 73,174 in the previous 24 hours. Despite the drop in daily fatalities since reaching a record last week, the numbers still rose to 3,560.
According to the Fiocruz Biomedical Institute, intensive care units in more than half of Brazilian states have occupancy rates in excess of 90%.
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