Brazilian doctors medevac indigenous COVID-19 cases to Amazon city

- The novel coronavirus is spreading so fast among the indigenous people in the furthest parts of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest that doctors are now evacuating critical COVID-19 patients by plane to the only intensive care units in the vast region.

“The number of COVID-19 patients has increased a lot. We are flying more planes (up the rivers); it’s the last opportunity to save their lives,” said Edson Santos Rodrigues, a pediatric doctor working on medevac planes for the state of Amazonas.

“Sometimes we don’t get there in time, because we cannot land at night on remote airfields that have no lights,” he said as he returned to the city of Manaus with a 26-year-old man of the Tikuna tribe, who was breathing through an oxygen tank aboard the plane. Manaus, the capital city of Amazonas, has some of the only intensive care units in the region.

The Brazilian government’s indigenous health service Sesai reported on Monday at least 23 indigenous people have died from COVID-19, the deadly illness caused by the coronavirus. The victims were in remote tribal territories, 11 of them in the upper reaches of the Amazon river bordering Colombia and Peru.

Brazil’s main tribal umbrella organization APIB counts the coronavirus cases of indigenous people who have migrated to urban areas and who are not treated by Sesai. The group reported on Monday a rise in the death toll with 103 confirmed deaths, up from 18 on April 3.