In a referral hospital, 70% of current patients with COVID-19 would not have been vaccinated; for doctors, there are cultural myths

In a third floor bed of the Pablo Arturo Suárez hospital, in the north of Quito, is hospitalized Santiago Martinez, 41 years old, since last October 29. You have coronavirus.

Is lying down and in his nose there is a nasal cannula, which is a plastic tube that supplies oxygen. Wear a mask. He says he feels much better.

Medical staff use what they call diving suits white, double mask, cap in hair and shoes are covered. There are medical teams and the windows are open.

Is he hospitalization area for COVID-19 patients from that health home, which is the reference for this pathology in Quito. It belongs to the Ministry of Public Health (MSP).

Around him there are other people: some are lying down with their eyes closed, others are walking and some are trying to make some colored balls rise pushed by your breath in devices called spirometers, which are used as exercise tests of the lungs. Not all make it.

Martínez do not know how it was infected. With some difficulty, he says that together with his brother they parked at a traffic light, some subjects cleaned the windows of his car and since he had no money they spat on them and poured water on them. They both got sick.

A few days later they began to feel sick, then fever and difficulty breathing. They went to the hospital. He spent two weeks in a bed in the intensive care unit (ICU), on the ground floor. His brother has already been discharged.

Martínez has not been vaccinated against the coronavirus. When asked why, he replies that due to carelessness and fear of people’s comments in the sense that the vaccine is a sham or that it causes harm.

Now he believes that if he had been vaccinated the disease would not have hit him as hard. “I have seen cases of people who have arrived vaccinated, it was a short time and it goes away. I’m already around 20 days, ”he said.

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Being hospitalized has also generated economic drawbacks. He works at a picture frame store. He had to deliver client jobs and cancel the lease.

In Ecuador there were 523,847 confirmed cases of COVID-19 until November 18, according to data from the Ecuadorian Ministry of Health. The increase in cases between the previous day was 492.

A few meters beyond Martínez is Hortensia Almeida, 64 years old. She is Venezuelan. Sitting on the bed, she tells that she came to Ecuador to visit, but on her way from Caracas she got infected, she doesn’t know where. Maybe at some airport, he assumes. She she is vaccinated with two doses of Sinovac against the coronavirus. He says he is fine.

Will leave the country to early January and has been hospitalized since last October 31.

Martínez is part of the 70% of patients who are hospitalized and in the COVID ICU, at the Pablo Arturo Suárez hospital with the peculiarity that has not been vaccinated.

Almeida is from 30 % what has been one or two shots But, because the necessary time has not passed, 2 to 3 weeks, the body has not started to produce antibodies.

That is the estimate made by Jorge Peñaherrera, manager of the Pablo Arturo Suárez hospital, of the people who are hospitalized.

“They have a lot of myths in his head: that with the vaccine they put a chip on them, that the vaccine is the rejection of real or effective vaccines from other countries, that they are not vaccinating, that it is a lie, that what they are given is saline solution, that the vaccine, etcetera; that’s what the patients tell you, “said Peñaherrera, about the answers about the reason for not accessing the vaccine.

Peñaherrera said that since August they started to reduce inpatient and ICU beds for COVID-19. They currently have 46 beds: 25 beds in hospitalization and 21 in intensive care.

The latter, at the end of August, went from 39 to 10 due to the drop in cases, but since the November holiday that number began to be insufficient due to a slight increase.

However, the cases for ICU they have again gone down. Of the 21 beds, there are 12 occupied and UCI.

With respect to hospitalization, There were 108 beds and since August they have been decreasing to 25. This variation in cases has not occurred in hospitalization, so that number has been maintained. There are 20 patients and 5 free beds.

In others MSP hospitals, Patients are evaluated and referred if necessary to Pablo Arturo Suárez, although it will depend on the medical situation and if a specialty is required, they are referred to others of greater complexity.

Patients have arrived from Quito health homes such as the Calderón teacher, Eugenio Espejo, Enrique Garcés, from several provinces and also from the IESS.

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In the General Hospital San Francisco of the IESS, which is located in the north of the city, in Carcelén, in general, 30 patients per day come for respiratory symptoms and of them, 8 to 10 are positive for COVID and 1 requires hospitalization, which is then transferred to IESS Quito Sur or Pablo Arturo Suárez.

“We still have patients who are diagnosed with the disease, who they have not been vaccinated with neither dose, sometimes it is a cultural matter and we also have patients who, despite having received the vaccine, well obviously yes they have developed COVID, mild in most cases, COVID moderate in a much smaller percentage obviously and severe in an even smaller percentage ”, said Iván Ayabaca, medical director of the General Hospital San Francisco of the IESS.

Ayabaca added that about two and a half weeks ago there was a small rebound of patients and diagnoses.

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For Francisco Pérez, Undersecretary of Health Surveillance of the Ministry of Public Health, hospitalizations are generally from people who do not comply with their vaccination schedule or that they do not have any type of vaccine.

He added that there are also cases of people who get vaccinated, but these cases are not serious and he surely attributed it to the delta variant or to another variant.

Although there was a “Very slight increase” of the number of cases in some provinces, according to Pérez, for the moment the situation is under control, but the pandemic has not been overcome. (I)