Velandia is proud of the hospital’s response to Covid-19 and recently showed CNN a new ICU facility that added 12 beds to the hospital’s arsenal. But he is also worried about his team — that same day, he said 5% of his staff was at home, sick with Covid. One was intubated in the emergency ward where they work.
Even for health workers who’ve avoided infection so far, fear and fatigue have crippled the unit after the near year-long pandemic.
“My team… They are tired, exhausted. They spend as many as 24 or 36 hours here, working all the time and we don’t have any more personnel,” Velandia told CNN.
Velandia looks with frustration at statistics on vaccine distribution in Europe and North America, where hundreds of thousands of frontline healthcare workers have already been vaccinated against the deadly virus. “I recently had a meeting, and my team was like ‘We can’t hold anymore’… we need the vaccine now!” he told CNN.
But like many countries in the developing world, Colombia is yet to receive a single dose of a vaccine.
Colombia’s conundrum
Colombian President Ivan Duque’s government was lauded last year by the World Health Organization (WHO) for its swift and well-coordinated pandemic response. After implementing social distancing measures early on, it increased the number of beds for intensive care, which almost doubled between March and August 2020, according to the health ministry.
But Colombia fell behind in the race to acquire vaccines. Now it finds itself essentially at the back of the queue, while nearby Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Chile have already begun to administer the lifesaving inoculations.
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