‘COVID-19 is not a threat. COVID-19 is a meme. Get back to work and live.’
These are the lines that some are hearing in the news. But unfortunately, no amount of propaganda can compete against reality, which always speaks for itself. As COVID-19 has spread across the world, it has left a trail of death and destruction. Now that the virus is in Brazil, Yahoo! News reports that ‘horror movie’ like conditions are being seen in cities as dead bodies pile up in stacks.
Bodies are piling up in refrigerated trucks outside overwhelmed hospitals. Doctors are in short supply. Bulldozers are digging mass graves at cemeteries. And the worst of the pandemic is yet to come.
Welcome to Manaus, the now chaotic and desperate riverside capital of vast Amazonas state as it grapples with the highest coronavirus mortality rate of any such city in Brazil.
The daily death rate here has shot up from 20 or 30 pre-pandemic to 100 a day in a matter of weeks after the city recorded its first case on March 13. And an already weak health care system has simply collapsed.
The pandemic has also reached extremely vulnerable indigenous communities in a state so huge it can take days of travel by boat to reach outlying towns and villages.
“It is a scene out of a horror movie. We are no longer in a state of emergency but rather of absolute calamity,” Manaus Mayor Virgilio Neto told AFP by telephone.
“People are dying at home, some perhaps because they got no medical care,” Neto said. He fears these are coronavirus deaths. (source)
COVID-19 is not a joke. It is very serious. It is overdue that people being treating it with the seriousness it deserves.
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