Between 360 and 400 health workers have died in Bolivia while fighting the new coronavirus after contracting the disease, while the country suffers an increase in the rate of infections in the middle of a crisis in the health sector.
“They all died on the front lines while doing their job, saving lives,” Cleto Cáceres, president of the Bolivian Medical College, told The Associated Press on Friday.
The Health Ministry has registered 360 deaths of health workers of which 100 are doctors, Virgilio Prieto, the government’s Chief of Epidemiology, told AP. The rest are nurses, orderlies and other assistants.
So far, Bolivia has registered 113,129 confirmed cases and 4,791 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Science and Systems Engineering.
The day before in the central region of Cochabamba, pediatric nurses from the Viedma Hospital dismissed their partner Josefina Casano, 63, with white balloons on the doors of the health center. Casano died of complications from covid-19.
“She loved children and died to take care of them,” a nurse told Bolivisión television.
In the Andean nation, the first infections occurred in March and according to experts from the Scientific Committee that advises the Ministry of Health, the peak is expected to occur in early September.
Cáceres assured that his concern is that the families have not yet received their compensation for a fight that in other countries is awarded.
“In Bolivia we have such a precarious health system that we do not even have the conditions for the doctors who are attending this emergency,” he added.
In the Andean nation, doctors and health workers are asking that 10% of the general budget be granted to the sector, a project that dates from the administration of former President Evo Morales but was postponed.
Interim President Jeaninne Áñez tried to have those funds granted but the initiative is in the Legislative Assembly, dominated by Morales supporters, which generates continuous disputes and delay in the approval of laws.
“We cannot continue like this, they think that by getting in the way of each other they get upset and it is not like that. The people are the great loser in all this,” said Cáceres.
With hospitals at the top, the country is committed to conducting house-to-house searches with rapid tests.
While the government announced that since September the country will open its borders with prior control to avoid contagions, reported the Minister of the Presidency, Yerko Núñez.
Núñez also explained that each regional government has the power to decide what measure to take according to “the seriousness” of the health situation.
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