The Mexican government has been sanitizing a public hospital in northern steel town Monclova that has become the center of a COVID-19 outbreak that has sickened at least 26 members of the medical staff and killed one of its doctors.
The outbreak raised questions about the preparedness of the public health system to confront a pandemic that is just beginning to gain steam in the nation.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday said that 80 public hospitals were being converted to handle people diagnosed with COVID-19.
Photo: EPA
Later he clarified that just segments of 80 hospitals were being isolated, with on average eight beds and ventilators reserved for COVID-19 patients.
“We are preparing ourselves to have the beds, the equipment, that is required,” he said.
He was scheduled to visit hospitals yesterday and today, bit it was unclear if Mexico is prepared for the pandemic.
Mexican Undersecretariat of Prevention and Health Promotion Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the government’s coronavirus spokesman, on Thursday said that only about 14,000 tests had been carried out nationwide since the start of the pandemic, adding that a donation of 50,000 tests arrived from China on Wednesday.
Epidemiologists on Sunday began retraining the staff at the hospital in Coahuila state on how to handle COVID-19 cases and personal protective equipment arrived at the hospital Wednesday, one day after the doctor’s death, Mexican health officials said.
The hospital accounts for 26 of the 39 reported cases of medical personnel infected with COVID-19, said Manuel Cervantes Ocampo of the public health system.
Three have died.
There was no immediate explanation for why personal protective equipment was only sent to the hospital this week.
Mexican health officials have said they have been preparing for the coronavirus since early January. The national health system also said that the hospital’s director had been removed from his position and put into isolation because he was more than 60 years old.
Everyone who works in the hospital’s emergency department was being screened for COVID-19 symptoms, a state government statement said.
Coahuila Governor Miguel Riquelme lamented the death of Walberto Reyes, and said doctors and nurses would be brought in from other hospitals to fill the gaps in Monclova.
Saul Coronado de Leon, a retired emergency-room nurse, lifelong friend of Reyes’ wife and a former colleague of the 45-year-old, said that he first registered a fever on March 21.
Three days later, he was taken to the emergency room and the following evening moved to the intensive care unit, where he spent a week before dying on Tuesday.
Coronado de Leon shared an anonymous account about the days leading up to Reyes’ illness that he said was written by a colleague at the hospital and circulated online.
A patient visited the emergency room on March 15 with acute respiratory distress and a chest X-ray suggested “atypical pneumonia,” the account said.
Once a consultation with a doctor said that it was a probable COVID-19 infection, staff in the emergency room requested personal protection equipment, but it was not provided.
Four days later, the patient was placed on a ventilator. During the week the patient was in the emergency room, three shifts of medical staff were exposed to him. The patient eventually died, the account said.
Coronado de Leon on Wednesdasy navigated the still unclear terrain of getting his friend buried. Reyes’ family had wanted him to be cremated, but the funeral home said health officials would not give them clearance. Eventually, Reyes was buried, with Coronado de Leon the only witness.
It was “pathetic,” he said.
The outpouring of grief on social media over Reyes’ death “is because of the kind of person Walberto was, the kind of doctor. He was a capable emergency-room physician, trained,” Coronado de Leon said. “This never should have happened.”
He said health workers are far more at risk than the public and he blamed the public health system for not better protecting them.
“This is a disaster,” he said.
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