Coronavirus shows the true face of Ecuador

 
A corpse in the street, while several people line up at a grocery store in Guayaquil. / REUTERS

Coronavirus shows the true face of Ecuador
x Vicky Peláez: Creepy images of corpses in the streets of Guayaquil wrapped in sheets, on the mattresses where they died or simply in black garbage bags

Many other bodies remained in their homes waiting to be collected by the authorities. According to the list that the police have to attend the uprisings, on March 31, more than 550 bodies were registered on the waiting list to be removed from the homes and it is not known how many bodies of Guayaquil residents were still abandoned in the corners of the streets. .

 The Ecuadorian journalist, Pedro X. Valverde Rivera wrote that "Guayaquil seems to have become a kind of sick, spoiled, rebellious and undisciplined daughter, who does not obey orders and threatens to infect the rest of the country. Nothing more perversely far from the truth" . What happened to these "warrior wood people" occurred due to the saturation of hospitals that no longer had the capacity to receive patients with clear symptoms of COVID-19, the collapse of the funeral system consisting of three crematoria - all private - with prices impossible for the popular classes and by the disposition of the central Government, by means of which only medical public officials of the ECU911 could sign the death certificates. This means that each day more than 100 doctors had to be sent to issue the certificates.

However, the most important cause in this tragedy is the lack of planning and the due and necessary foresight of the pandemic that was already looming on the doorstep of the American continent, especially in Ecuador - the first case of which was recorded on February 3 - of a woman who came to Guayaquil from Spain with clear signs of coronavirus infection and who was not given adequate importance.

The corpse of a deceased by coronavirus, abandoned at the gates of a Guayaquil medical center. / EFE / DIARIO EXPRESO (Diario Expreso)

From there it happened in Guayaquil, Guayas province, what the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad highlighted in his novel, The Heart in Darkness (1899) with two words: "horror, horror". Neither the closure of borders nor the extended curfew declared by the Government have been able to prevent Ecuador, of almost 17 million inhabitants, from becoming the Latin American country with the highest rate of infections and lethality of its coronavirus and the fourth in all of America most affected by COVID-19 after the United States, Canada and Brazil.

Guayaquil in this context, is the city with the highest mortality rate per 100,000 inhabitants in the entire South American continent. The fear of getting infected has taken over the entire city and the country in general. In the province of Guayas, to which Guayaquil belongs, for April 2, 1,941 infected were registered, 61.4% of the national total that reached 3,163. Officially, the Government reported 120 deaths throughout the country, but taking into account the case of Guayaquil, where most of the more than 500 deceased had not even undergone the virus test, the number of the dead would be much more and it is a matter of time. for the actual data to appear.

Vice President Otto Sonnenholzner pointed out on March 30 that the number of deaths with COVID-19 symptoms is increasing and that up to 10 deaths per day are registered in the city's hospitals, but he refused to specify, forcing the mayor from Guayaquil, Cynthia Viteri, who is in quarantine because she tested positive for the coronavirus, to demand that the Government of Lenín Moreno inform the truth about the official figures of deaths from the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the panic that has dominated the entire city forced his burgomaster to declare that "nobody enters and nobody leaves", Guayaquil also being isolated by a government decree as a "national security zone" that grants the Armed Forces to assume control of public space with all the restrictions that this implies including the curfew.

Without a doubt, the state of exception at the time of the pandemic helps to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, but what is most needed is medical attention, having enough reagents for testing for COVID-19, enough medical specialists, laboratories, medical supplies such as masks, gloves etc. what Ecuador lacks. A shortage of reagents is reported in Guayaquil under conditions of the overflow of the request for patients to take tests. From February 29 to April 1, 8,747 tests have already been processed in three laboratories of the National Institute for Public Health Research (INSPI) of the Ministry of Public Health. But its results take almost a week. At the same time, in private laboratories, such as Kennedy, there are reagents but the price of the test is between 250 and 300 dollars, which not every Guayaquil can face.

 

Politically Correct / The works of the citizen revolution