Health workers in Brazil have been forced to intubate patients without sedatives, according to reports, after weeks of warnings that hospitals and state governments were in danger of running out of crucial drugs.
For days, health workers diluted sedatives to stretch their stocks, a doctor at the Albert Schweitzer municipal hospital in Rio de Janeiro told The Associated Press. When they were finished, nurses and doctors began using neuromuscular blockers and tying patients to their beds, he added.
“You relax the muscles and perform the procedure easily, but we do not have sedatives,” said the doctor, who agreed to speak about the delicate situation on the condition that his name was not disclosed. “Some try to speak, to resist. They are conscious ”.
The lack of medicines is the most recent problem in the pandemic to affect Brazil, which is experiencing a very severe outbreak of coronavirus that has caused saturation of intensive care units.
The daily death toll is averaging about 3,000, which represents a quarter of deaths from COVID-19 globally and makes the South American country the epicenter of the pandemic.
Intubation kits include anesthetics, sedatives, and other medications used to connect critically ill patients to ventilators.
The press office of the Rio City Health Secretariat noted in an email that the occasional shortage of drugs at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital is due to difficulties in getting supplies in the global market and that “substitutions are made so as not to prejudice the assistance provided ”.
The bureau did not mention the issue of the patients tied to the beds.
The newspaper O Globo reported on Thursday similar difficult experiences in several more hospitals in the Rio metropolitan region, in which desperate people call other clinics in search of sedatives for their loved ones.
It is unknown if the problem in Rio is an isolated case, but other hospitals are sounding the alarm that they will have a shortage of medicines.
Sao Paulo state health secretary Jean Carlo Gorinchteyn told a press conference that the situation is dire in hospitals in Brazil’s most populous state. On Thursday, more than 640 hospitals were on the brink of collapse because they could be short of supplies in a matter of days, according to authorities.
The suspect, also deceased, was 19 years old.
“We need the support of the federal government,” declared Gorinchteyn. “This is not a necessity for Sao Paulo; it is a necessity for the whole country”.