Omicron surge decimates staff at hospitals in South America
Health workers fall ill, forcing some facilities to confront third wave of virus shorthanded.
BRASILIA, Brazil — The Omicron coronavirus variant starting to barrel across South America is pressuring hospitals whose employees are taking sick leave, leaving facilities understaffed to cope with the pandemic’s third wave.
A major hospital in Bolivia’s largest city stopped admitting new patients due to lack of personnel, and one of Brazil’s most populous states canceled scheduled surgeries for a month. Argentina’s federation of private healthcare providers told the Associated Press it estimates that about 15% of its health workers have active cases.
The third wave “is affecting the health team a lot, from the cleaning staff to the technicians, with a high percentage of sick people, despite having a complete vaccination schedule,” said Jorge Coronel, president of Argentina’s medical confederation. “While symptoms are mostly mild to moderate, that group needs to be isolated.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way: South America’s vaccine uptake was high once shots became available. About two-thirds of the continent’s roughly 435 million residents are fully immunized, the highest percentage for any global region, according to Our World in Data. And health workers in Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina have already been receiving booster shots.
But the Omicron variant is defying vaccines, sending case numbers surging.
Argentina saw an average 112,000 daily confirmed cases in the week through Sunday, up from 3,700 a month before. Brazil’s health ministry is still recovering from a hack that left coronavirus data incomplete; even so, it shows an average 69,000 daily cases in the same seven-day period, up 1,900% from the month before.
Omicron spreads more easily than other coronavirus strains and is already dominant in many areas — among them, Brazil and parts of Argentina.
Additionally, the variant more easily infects those who have been vaccinated or infected by earlier versions of the virus. Early studies show that Omicron is less likely to cause serious diseases than the Delta variant, and vaccination and booster shots offer strong protection against serious illness, hospitalization and death.
Lesser severity leaves South America’s fully vaccinated residents loath to give up their long-awaited summer, which, they were told, would mark a return to normality. The enduring pandemic often seems an afterthought to people who are out and about and don’t realize how Omicron has started to affect medical workers. Beaches were packed over the weekend in Argentina and Brazil.
Matías Fernández Norte, a surgeon at the Hospital de Clínicas in Buenos Aires, said the high number of professionals on leave has generated “physical and spiritual fatigue, in addition to the stress of dealing with a patient on the edge.”
“You feel like you are living a parallel reality. In the street you meet a world that doesn’t seem to feel the pandemic,” he said. “Sometimes it feels like people have forgotten.”
Brazil’s council of state health secretariats estimates that 10% to 20% of all professionals in the network — including doctors, nurses, nurse technicians, ambulance drivers and others in direct contact with patients — have taken sick leave since the last week of 2021.
“We are having trouble making the schedules,” said the council’s director, Carlos Lula.
The press office of Rio de Janeiro state’s health secretariat told the AP that about 5,500 professionals have left their jobs since December. All elective surgeries scheduled in the state health network have been suspended for four weeks. As for urgent care, relocations of staff and overtime have become stopgap measures.
“Forty percent of our staff is on sick leave,” Marcia Fernandes Lucas, health secretary for the municipality of Sao Joao de Meriti, in Rio’s metropolitan region, told the AP. “We are able to work with these 60% by redeploying them [between health centers].”
Public hospitals in Bolivia are operating at 50% to 70% of capacity due to the high number of infections among healthcare workers, according to the country’s doctors union. In Santa Cruz, the Children’s Hospital is overwhelmed — less by the number of patients than by the percentage of staff falling ill, according to Freddy Rojas, the facility’s vice director. Last week, the hospital stopped admitting new patients.
“There has been a collapse, because we don’t have replacements,” said José Luís Guaman, interim president of the doctors union in Santa Cruz.
In Argentina, such is the risk of medical services grinding to a halt in Buenos Aires province — the country’s most populous — that health workers who are asymptomatic and vaccinated have been allowed to return to work even if they have come into contact with someone who is infected. Other provinces in Argentina are expected to adopt the same rules in the coming days, in line with the health ministry’s recently issued guidelines.
Chile, meanwhile, has seen a constant increase in its case count, prompting the reactivation of publicand private-sector hospital beds, but so far the country hasn’t experienced hospital overload. Peru has also seen case numbers rise, but its facilities aren’t suffering.
The Pan American Health Organization said last week it expects Omicron to become the predominant coronavirus variant in the Americas in the coming weeks. Ten countries in the region — especially in the Caribbean — didn’t reach the goal set by the World Health Organization to have 40% of citizens fully vaccinated by the end of 2021.
While a smaller fraction of people develop serious illness from the the variant, the crush of contagion and strain on hospitals means Omicron shouldn’t be underestimated, said Lula, of the Brazilian health secretariat council.
“People have to understand that the argument that Omicron is ‘mild’ is false,” Lula said.
Álvares and Calatrava write for the Associated Press. Calatrava reported from Buenos Aires. AP reporters Carlos Valdez and Paola Flores contributed to this report from La Paz, Bolivia; Mario Lobão from Rio de Janeiro; Patricia Luna and Eva Vergara from Santiago, Chile; and Franklin Briceño from Lima, Peru.