Paraguay opens military barracks for patients due to overwhelmed hospitals

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – “What we enabled this morning is already a third line of action in the catastrophic scenario that we are now facing,” Roque Silva, director of the XI Health Region, told the media during the enabling of 25 beds at the headquarters of the Army’s Military Teaching Institutes Command, in the city of Roque Alonso, north of Asunción.

“We are in a very complicated moment, no matter who you are or how much money you have, today you will not be able to have a bed in a common ward or intensive care,” added Silva at the ceremony, which was attended by the country’s president, Mario Abdo Benítez.

Silva said that the new beds, which are expected to increase to fifty, will be for patients in the recovery process who are referred from hospitals to complete their treatment. “We hope that this is a message to the citizenship, we are in a limited situation. This will give us a little oxygen, but if the citizenship does not help us, we can see another even worse scenario,” Silva warned.

Silva said that only in Central, the epicenter of the pandemic and area of influence of his health region, this day there were 52 patients in reanimation rooms waiting for beds in intensive care units.

In earlier statements to the media, he detailed that half of those admitted to intensive care are under 40 years of age and 25% of them have no evidence of pre-existing diseases, at a time when the country is recording an average of 2,000 infections per day, with the record number of deaths recorded in one day last Sunday, with 60 deaths.

In line with these figures, the Ministry of Health indicated that Paraguay is the second country in the region with the highest number of daily deaths per million inhabitants, with 6.17 7-day moving average, behind Brazil, with 11.96, at the close of the last epidemiological week.

Paraguay “exhibits an increasing trend (…) approaching the most critical situation reported in Europe (7.30 deaths per million) and North America (8.38 deaths per million) at the end of January in the recent wave that affected these regions in autumn-winter,” the report said.

Paraguay, with confirmed community circulation of the most contagious variant, the Brazilian P1, is under quarantine from March 26th to April 4th to attenuate the virus’s sustained transmission for several weeks.

Since the pandemic outbreak a year ago, the South American country has recorded a total of 4,161 deaths and 212,691 infections.

In addition to the health system’s weakness, there has been a delay in the arrival of vaccines, mostly donated from other countries and only for target personnel.

Source: EFE