Hospitals on the brink in Peru as coronavirus epicentre shifts to the Americas

Peru is struggling to contend with a surge of coronavirus infections, with officials warning that its creaking public health system is near collapse, amid a continent-wide escalation in cases.

Close to 99 per cent of intensive care beds in Lima and neighbouring port city Callao, which are together home to 10 million people, are filled with critically ill Covid-19 patients requiring ventilator or oxygen support, government data shows.

The situation is so severe that only six intensive care beds are left in Lima. At the Villa Mongrut hospital complex, in the centre of the Peruvian capital, close to 40 patients are on the ICU waiting list.

“Unfortunately some are dying while on the waiting list,” Alicia Abanto, deputy director of Peru’s public services, told reporters on Tuesday.

Other regions are also buckling under the pressures. Hospitals in Peru's north, south and central regions are overflowing with coronavirus patients after ICUs ran out of beds last week.

Peru has not faired well against Covid-19. The country, along with Ecuador, is one of the hardest hit countries in the world according to population size – each reporting more than 1,000 excess deaths per million inhabitants.

Experts say that decades of underinvestment in public health have stripped Peru’s intensive care capacity to the bare bones.

The entire country, which has a population around 32 million, has only 1,656 ICU beds. That is less than the 1,800-plus beds available in Bogota, the capital of neighbouring Colombia which is home to a comparative 7.4 million people.

The availability of  is ventilators is also scare. In June 2020, the US donated 250 ventilators to Peru, increasing the country’s ventilator capacity by 19 per cent.

Peru has recorded more than 38,335 deaths related to Covid-19 and more than a million cases of coronavirus infections since the pandemic reached the country in mid-March, according to official data.

It is thought that the latest uptick in cases was driven by the large protests in November that generated political chaos in Peru – and led to the naming of three presidents in a week – as well as holiday gatherings.

“We’re now paying for the behaviour of the past few weeks,” Fernando Padilla, a regional health chief in northern Peru, told reporters last week.

The wave of infections comes as the epicentre of the pandemic shifts once again to the Americas.

According to the World Health Organization's weekly epidemiological report, the region accounted for 45 per cent of new deaths reported in the last week and half of new infections.

In total 2.5 million new cases and over 38 000 fatalities were detected - a record high and an increase of 30 per cent and 18 per cent compared to the previous seven days, respectively.

Much of this was driven by the United States, where a whooping 1.7  million new cases and more than 20,000 deaths have occured.

But Brazil – where a highly infectious new variant has been detected in the northern Amazonas state – has seen a 35 per cent increase in cases and a 23 per cent rise in deaths. Last week the country surpassed the grim milestone of 200,000 Covid-19 fatalities.

An explosion of parties over the holiday period, egged on by members of Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, has been blamed for spiralling infection figures. Online accounts, including Brazil Covidfest, have emerged to highlight gatherings but many public health experts predict the trend is unlikely to reverse with carnival on the horizon.

The WHO report also highlights a surge in new infections in Colombia and fatalities in Mexico.

In the former – where the Foreign and Defence Ministers this week tested positive for Covid-19 – the mayors of the capital and second largest city, Bogota and Medellin, have introduced lockdowns to prevent hospitals under growing pressure from collapsing.

Meanwhile end of year blowouts and household mixing over the holidays has led to a surge in cases across Mexico, subsequently depleting the country’s hospital capacity.

In Mexico City, 89 per cent of general hospital beds and 84 per cent of hospital beds with ventilators are now filled. The same is true for 82 per cent of general hospital beds and 79 per cent of beds with ventilators in the State of Mexico, official data shows.

“We’re at the highest peak of hospitalizations since the pandemic began and it continues to increase,” Major of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum said on Monday.

Globally, the situation looks similarly bleak. After two weeks with lower case figures, probably due to disruption associated with Christmas and New Year, the WHO warned that “the overall upward trend seen in earlier weeks has resumed”.

In the last seven days, a record number of new cases have been detected - just shy of five million - while 85,000 people died from Covid-19 worldwide.

With the exception of South-East Asia, every region saw infections climb.

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