Sick medics at hospital in Mexico plead for help
MEXICO CITY — Interns and resident doctors at a public hospital on the outskirts of Mexico’s capital say that 26 of them have tested positive for the covid-19 disease and request personal protective equipment and better training for all of the hospital’s staff members.
In an open letter to Mexico’s health secretary, the doctors and medical students detailed a situation where basic protocols were not followed, a lack of supervision left inexperienced medical personnel to fend for themselves and staff members had to find and buy their own protective equipment. The letter’s authors were not named, but said they are the doctors and interns now quarantined and suffering from the effects of the new coronavirus.
A lack of resources and training in the face of the pandemic has spurred a number of protests by workers in Mexico’s public-health system in recent weeks. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has conceded that the system does not have the number of doctors and nurses that it needs as the epidemic begins to ramp up. One planeload of medical gear arrived from China last week.
Mexico has more than 3,844 confirmed covid-19 infections and 233 deaths as of Saturday.
Zoe Robledo, director of Mexico health system, said Wednesday that talk of a covid-19 outbreak at the Tlalnepantla hospital was “incorrect.” He said an investigation showed three starting points for the outbreak — a patient who has recovered, a doctor who didn’t have contact with covid-19 patients and another doctor who also was working in another health system. He differentiated it from an outbreak at a public hospital in the northern city of Monclova, which an investigation confirmed spread within the hospital.
The doctors and students demanded a public apology from Robledo.
“Denying the presence of outbreaks in hospitals will not lead to managing them,” the doctors and interns wrote.
The public-health system’s hospital in the northern suburb of Tlalnepantla had been designated as a facility to handle coronavirus patients, but patients displaying those symptoms were supposed to be isolated from other parts of the hospital.
The letter said that did not occur and 19 of the 26 resident doctors in internal medicine tested positive days after a patient displaying coronavirus symptoms was taken to their floor. More such cases followed and the medical personnel there had not been given protective equipment.
In late March, so many of the hospital’s more experienced doctors were staying home and so many residents were showing symptoms and not working that the residents and interns were left practically alone with one or two residents for 85 patients, the letter said.
When Mexico’s health undersecretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell was asked about the hospital Thursday night, he spoke only generally about more protective equipment being distributed in the public-health system, but did not address what happened at the hospital.
The doctors said the hospital’s epidemiology unit did not move to test them until March 30 and even then made the residents take samples from one another without protective equipment. Those whose symptoms were not bad enough yet continued working, and several of those later tested positive, the letter said.
The hospital situation is taking place as attacks increase against health care workers by some members of the public, who fear they spread contagion.
Mexico’s National Commission on Preventing Discrimination said Friday that complaints of attacks or discrimination against medical personnel had doubled in the past few days. The most common incidents reported were refusals by buses, taxis or other means of transportation to pick up health care workers, or verbal or physical attacks.
Mexico City authorities said they were stepping up security at hospitals after relatives of a patient allegedly assaulted a doctor and another health care worker at one hospital.