Three years after the first victim of the coronavirus in Argentina: the 64-year-old patient died without knowing what was killing him

Guillermo Abel Gómez died without knowing why. He knew that he had a forty degree fever, that he had diarrhea, that he was hypertensive and diabetic, that he suffered from kidney failure and chronic bronchitis. I knew he was 64. He was unaware that because of his age, he belonged to the high-risk population. Nor did he know the risk of what. He knew that they had sent him back twice from the Argerich hospital: his symptoms, in the first days of this pivotal month of March 2020, did not configure a clinical picture of hospitalization.

The third visit was the last. Nélida, Guillermo’s wife, no longer knew what to do to bring down her fever. He called Luis Contreras, a close family friend, then in his 80s. He told her it was very bad. He does not hesitate and takes the train and bus from El Jagüel, in the southern suburbs of Buenos Aires, to San Telmo, the new neighborhood of Guillermo and Nélida, since their return from exile. Luis checked the extent of the woman’s concern. His friend’s physical deterioration was obvious to the eye. They called the ambulance at 107. They recounted the symptoms and conditions of her state of health with the gymnastics of repeated dictation: it was not the first time Nélida had done this. They told him to insist for a moment, that the ambulance was being disinfected.

Luis decided to act. “I helped him get dressed, we put his shoes on, I loaded him up and took him down the street. We hailed a taxi and took him to the hospital“, he said in the third of the microdocumentaries of People, not numbersa cycle of short films signed by the directors Jorge Ponce Betti and Andrés Brenner, to honor the memory of women and men who have become dramas and characters, within the statistical framework of an emerging pandemic.

Guillermo was admitted to Argerich Hospital in the La Boca neighborhood on his third attempt to get medical attention. “And from then on, it didn’t come again,” remarked his friend bluntly. A few days ago, in the afternoon of Tuesday, March 3, 2020, Ginés González García had launched a press conference of the Ministry of Health of the Nation he was presiding at the time with a chilling sentence: “We have the first confirmed case of coronavirus in the country”. To her left was the Secretary of Access to Health and who would replace her in the post months later, Carla Vizzotti, and to her right her counterpart from the government of the city of Buenos Aires, Fernán Quiroz, current candidate for the head of Buenos Aires. Government.

But coronaviruses, isolations, confinements, symptoms, protocols, samples, little was known in Argentina. The first case in the country was Ariel, a 43-year-old man who had returned from vacation from Milan, Italy, and who two days earlier had developed a fever and suffered from respiratory complications. His transition from illness has been benevolent: “I felt very good from the first moment I arrived. I had a fever the first night and then it went away. Now I am in perfect health. I’m having a good time and I don’t feel anything. I am perfect,” he told the media. He was released after eleven days of hospitalization and isolation at the Agote sanatorium in the Recoleta neighborhood.

When Ariel returned home, Guillermo had been dead for six days. He too had returned from Europe. He too had suffered from similar symptoms. His stay due to illness was antagonistic. During the third and last visit to the Argerich, he could no longer stand, he could no longer lift his head. He spent four and a half hours waiting to be taken care of. A security guard lent him his chair so he wouldn’t collapse while on guard duty. They isolated him, they swabbed him, the result was negative, they took him out of isolation, they put him in a box in the coronary unit, they told him he had a pneumonia.

On Friday March 6, there were already two confirmed cases of covid-19 in Argentina: another man from Europe, another picture of fever, cough and general malaise. Luis visited his friend at the hospital in Argerich: there was no isolation protocol to avoid the source of contagion. He saw him hooked up to a mechanical respirator, he saw him beaten. The next morning, doctors reported him dead. On the morning of Saturday March 7, 2020, Guillermo Abel Gómez had died: He was 64 years old, had a fever of forty degrees, diarrhea and morbidities, was hypertensive and diabetic, suffered from kidney failure and chronic bronchitis. I didn’t know I had coronavirus. The authorities ratified the report which circulated in the corridors of the hospital at 7:00 p.m. the same day: the samples sent to the National Administration of Laboratories and to the Dr. Carlos Malbrán Health Institute (Anlis) confirmed the positive result to covid-19.

It was the first in Argentina and in all of Latin America. He decreed the start of a trickle-down genocide. Three years have passed since that first time. Coronavirus deaths in the country have soared: to date, according to the latest report from the Ministry of Health, there are 130,463. Guillermo had the tragic honor of being case number one. He died without knowing anything about his illness. He died because he had gone to France to meet his newborn granddaughter. He had lived in France because in Argentina you could kill him. He was a Peronist activist and political exile. Ricardo Zambrano, a friend and fellow exile, described him as “a revolutionary”.

He was born in Villa Soldati in 1956. His father, a municipal worker, got him his first job as a garbage collector. He developed a passion for social work. A political commitment emerges from the injustice he discovers in the poor neighborhoods of the city of Buenos Aires. He consolidated his ideological trait, his militancy. As long as without being born in a village, he settled there to strengthen his cause. He joined the Movimiento Villero Peronista, the country’s first slum organization which lasted only three years: from 1973 to 1976, dismantled at the dawn of the March 24 civil-military coup.

In 1972 it already took part in “Circumscription 22”, which included Soldati, part of Mataderos and Lugano. There he met Alicia Vázquez, an activist friend who described him as “a strong, kind, tenacious, united man, with ideals, with political and social commitment”. He advocates the construction of drains, ditches, first aid rooms and sidewalks in the neighborhood. He was preoccupied with resolving old government debts, with healing inequalities. He did not tolerate injustice.

Nelly, who was neither a native of Soldati nor a villager, accompanied him to the town of Soldati. They were united by an ideological clamor and a social drivebut they were quite different. Roberto Baschetti, a sociologist and historian who met them in exile in 1987, said: “Guillermo was the antithesis of her, he was not an intellectual, he had no university education, but he had a street .” They lived through a hostile time: what they did involved a risk.

In 1975 Triple A began persecuting social activists. Luis Contrateras, another member of the Villero Peronista Movement, recalled in the afternoon documentary that he had not found them in his home. “Companions of the movement were disappearing,” he says. We agreed that we would pick them up to transfer them to another location. I went with a colleague in a Jeep to look for them and when we arrived they had already taken them at dawn. A neighbor told us that guys dressed in green came, put a rope around her neck, took Nelly pregnant and hit her in the stomach with their buttocks.”.

Two weeks later, Nélida is found lying in the street. They had tortured her. Shortly after, Guillermo appeared. “They kidnapped him, tortured him, pulled out his teeth and fingernails and threw him into the Riachuelo to drown him., for him to die. He was able to reach the shore and come into contact with the village priests who saved, protected, hid, healed and helped him,” said Ricardo Zambrano, a fellow exile. They emigrate to Paris as refugees: their militant friends say that various ecclesiastical actors contributed to their flight.

In the French capital, she worked as a cook in a kind of episcopal cloister and he first worked as a dishwasher in a bar until he got a job as a nurse in an official legal tender printing house. . An anecdote told by Roberto Baschetti during his career transition details Guillermo’s moral stature: “In this journey of going from place to place in search of a better job, he walked into a bar and ordered two slices of pizza and a glass of water. The owner told him, “My friend, I can’t believe that with the body you have, you’re ordering two slices of pizza.” You don’t want more? “I would love to, but I don’t know how to pay,” he replied and explained the situation to her. “I can’t give you a job,” the man told her. But I offer you something. You continue to look for work and every lunchtime come and eat here. And then when I get a job, he pays me. Later, religiously, when he got a job, he paid him all the mangoes he owed him.

His daughter Maria Eugenia was born in France. In France they lived for several decades. In France, he was elected trade union representative of workers in the public body. In 2014, they returned to live in the country. They settled in a PH – on the first floor by stairs – in the neighborhood of San Telmo. Their daughter did not accompany them. In Argentina, they did not benefit from social work. Guillermo was in poor health. The birth of their granddaughter took them to Europe, where a pandemic was slowly beginning to spread. He returns home on February 25. Three days later, the symptoms reappeared. He had drowsiness, a cough that bothered him, a sharp sore throat and a fever that did not drop below 100 degrees. He had coronavirus. He never knew.

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