Omicron variant of COVID-19 affects hospitals in South America

The variant omicron of coronavirus that begins to spread throughout South America is putting pressure on hospitals whose employees are taking sick leave, leaving facilities understaffed to deal with the third wave of COVID-19.

A major hospital in Bolivia’s largest city has stopped accepting new patients due to lack of staff, and one of Brazil’s most populous states has canceled scheduled surgeries for a month. The Argentine Federation of Health Providers (FAPS), which belongs to the private sector, indicated that it estimates that around 15% of its health workers are currently infected with the virus.

“There is a high demand for all services, from testing to the first level of care. And this creates a lot of tension. This wave is greatly affecting the health team, from the cleaning staff, the technicians, the professionals, with a high percentage who fell ill, although they are fully vaccinated”, described Jorge Coronel, president of the Medical Confederation of the Republic. Argentina (Comra). “While the symptoms are mostly mild to moderate, that group has to be isolated.”

It’s not supposed to be like this: vaccination in South America advanced rapidly once doses became available. About two-thirds of its nearly 435 million people are fully immunized, the highest percentage recorded in any region of the world, according to the online publication Our World in Data. And health workers in Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina received booster doses beforehand.

However, the omicron variant is defying vaccines, causing an increase in infections. Argentina registered an average of 112,000 daily confirmed cases in the week to January 16, an increase from the 3,700 reported a month earlier.

Brazil’s Health Ministry is still reeling from a hack that caused coronavirus data to remain incomplete; Even so, the figures show an increase to an average of 69,000 daily cases in the same seven-day period, an increase of 1,900% of the infections reported a month earlier.

The omicron variant spreads even more easily than other strains and is already dominant in many countries, including Brazil and some regions of Argentina. It also spreads more easily among those who are previously vaccinated or infected with previous versions of the virus.

Preliminary studies show that the omicron variant is less likely to cause serious illness than the delta variant, and vaccination and booster doses still offer strong protection against serious illness, hospitalization, and death.

Less severe has caused people in South America to be reluctant to enjoy the long-awaited summer that they were told would mark a return to normal after a full vaccination.

The enduring pandemic often seems to have taken a backseat to those who wander from one side to the other and stop to see how the omicron variant has begun to affect medical personnel. The beaches looked crowded this weekend in Argentina and Brazil.

Matías Fernández Norte, a surgeon at the Hospital de Clínicas in Buenos Aires, said that the high number of medical staff absent due to illness “generates this physical exhaustion and also the spiritual exhaustion and the stress of dealing with patients on the edge.”

“You feel like living in a parallel reality. Because when you go out into the street and see people gathered… you find a world that doesn’t seem to feel the pandemic,” Fernández explained. “It seems that we are the only ones who know that there is an active pandemic, at times it seems that people have forgotten.”

The council of state health secretaries in Brazil estimates that between 10% and 20% of all health professionals in the health network — including doctors, nurses, nursing technicians, ambulance drivers and others in direct contact with patients — has been absent due to illness since the last week of 2021.

“We are having problems creating schedules,” said the president of the National Council of Secretaries of Health, Carlos Lula.

The press office of the state health secretariat in Rio de Janeiro noted that approximately 5,500 health professionals have left their posts since December. All scheduled elective surgeries in the state health network have been suspended for four weeks. Regarding emergency medical care, relocations and overtime have been chosen as temporary measures.

“40% of our staff is absent due to illness,” Marcia Fernandes Lucas, secretary of health for the municipality of Sao Joao de Meriti, in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area, told the AP at her office. “We have managed to work with that 60% by relocating them (between health centers).”

Public hospitals in Bolivia operate between 50% and 70% of their capacity due to the high number of infections among health workers, according to the Bolivian medical union.

In Santa Cruz, the country’s most populous city, the Children’s Hospital is saturated, but less because of the number of patients than because of the number of staff who are getting sick, according to Freddy Rojas, its deputy director. Last week, the facility stopped accepting new patients.

Such is the risk that medical services will come to a standstill in Buenos Aires, the most populous province in Argentina, that health personnel have been allowed to return to work even if they have had contact with someone infected with COVID-19, show that they are asymptomatic. and is vaccinated. Other Argentine provinces are expected to adopt the same measures in the coming days, in accordance with recently issued Ministry of Health regulations.

Doctor Luis Cámera, one of the experts who advises the Argentine government on the pandemic and head of the geriatric medicine program at Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, declared that “the number of infections has caused the availability of the workforce to decrease dramatically. manifest form”.

“It has been generating many problems for about 15 days and this is going to continue for a while longer because the number of cases we are having is very marked,” he said. “In the Italian Hospital practically 20% to 25% of the staff is outside the care circuit; it is very dynamic, this week (last) has been worse”.