lunes, 23 de marzo de 2020

Maduro´s “bolivarian” succes !!!





Venezuelans wear masks as they try to enter neighboring Colombia on Sunday.




Venezuela’s broken health system is uniquely vulnerable to coronavirus. Neighbors are afraid the country will hemorrhage infected migrants.




March 20, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. GMT-3

CARACAS, Venezuela — Inside one of Venezuela's largest hospitals, doctors wearing gloves and masks but no protective gowns tended to a suspected coronavirus patient.
HIV patients languished in a room a few feet away. The door was left open, to allow air to circulate — the unit here at Caracas University Hospital has no working air conditioning. Running water, albeit with dark contaminants, came back three days ago. But doctors say it’s unlikely to last for long.

As in many hospitals in this collapsed socialist state, even washing hands is a luxury. The hospital has run out of soap, leaving doctors to bring their own, when possible. None of the six X-ray machines works. Without cleaning products to disinfect surfaces — including those in the waiting room where suspected coronavirus patients are held — hospital infections are common. A shipment of gloves and masks arrived Friday; doctors say they had gone a full month without them. Current supplies, they say, will run out in one week.“If we start getting large numbers of patients, we will collapse,” said Maria Eugenia Landaeta, head of the infectious-diseases department at Caracas University Hospital. “Long lines of patients waiting, all beds full and patients we won’t be able to hospitalize. To sum up: total chaos.”

Analysts say Venezuela, already struggling under a dangerous mix of gaps in clean water and soap, underequipped and inadequately supplied public hospitals and authoritarian red tape, is uniquely vulnerable to the pandemic. As the government of President Nicolás Maduro tries to roll out a historic response to a global challenge it is ill-equipped to confront, Venezuela’s neighbors increasingly fear that the country will become a petri dish for the novel coronavirus, hemorrhaging infected migrants and spreading the virus across hard-to-control borders.

“An explosive number of cases would obviously surpass the ability of the Venezuelan health-care system, and will end up with many people demanding care in Colombia,” said Fernando Ruiz Gómez, Colombia’s health minister. “Intensive-care services will be most critical.”

In a few days, South American nations from Brazil to Bolivia to Peru have emerged as some of the world’s most proactive states in seeking to control the virus, imposing curfews, deploying the military, closing borders and barring many, and in some cases all, international flights.

But few were as early or aggressive as Venezuela. Maduro shut businesses and limited public gatherings last Friday. Soldiers and police have set up roadblocks, limiting movement to people traveling to work, markets, pharmacies and hospitals. The streets of Caracas are now eerily quiet.

The number of confirmed cases of covid-19 announced by the government has grown from two to 46 in less than a week (opposition officials say the real number of people infected is far higher). Maduro has ordered all citizens to wear face masks in public. Members of the SEBIN, his feared intelligence police, are guarding hospitals.
“Either we quarantine, or the pandemic could tragically and painfully take down Venezuela,” Maduro told the nation this week.

The response is complicated by the country’s political stalemate: In Venezuela, even the basic question of who’s in charge remains in doubt. Maduro, who claimed the presidency last year after an election widely viewed as fraudulent, has sought to use the crisis to demonstrate his de facto control of the country. Opposition leader Juan Guaidó is recognized by the United States and more than 50 other nations as its rightful leader.

More than 5 million Venezuelans — a sixth of the population — have fled poverty, hunger and spreading disease in recent years. Venezuelan migrants were identified as the source of a wave of measles that spread throughout South America in 2018, and they imported long-dormant diseases such as diphtheria to neighboring Colombia. Now fears that the coronavirus could ravage this underfed nation have led Colombian and Brazilian authorities to close their borders with Venezuela.
Furtado earns $50 a month. Bottled water, at $5 a gallon, is well out of reach.
“It’s not only the high prices of soap,” she said, “it’s also a problem to find it.” Living with her mother, a cancer patient, she cleans her house only with her homemade soap solution.