Guayaquil, Ecuador, becomes coronavirus warning for region
Pedro Zavala, a paramedic in the Ecuadorian town of Machala, was rushing to the country’s largest city on Thursday carrying precious cargo: a portable ventilator.
It was the second time this week that Zavala had made the 120-mile drive to Guayaquil, which has become the epicenter of Ecuador’s coronavirus crisis.
“Hospitals are running out of everything,” Zavala said in a telephone interview. “People are looking for oxygen tanks, respirators, ventilators, masks, anything.”
Guayaquil, a steamy coastal city of 2.3 million people, has been hit harder by the coronavirus than almost any other metropolitan area in the Americas. Images shared on social media show coughing patients languishing outside of overcrowded hospitals, people slumped on the street dying.
The city has been overwhelmed, said Guayaquil Mayor Cynthia Viteri, who has also tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
“What’s happened with our healthcare system? They’re not taking the dead out of the houses, they’re leaving them on the sidewalk,” she said on Facebook. “Families are wandering the city knocking on doors hoping a hospital will take them in, but there are no more beds.”
The city has raided a $10 million fund set aside to celebrate Guayaquil’s bicentennial to buy 50,000 additional rapid test kits, 40 portable ventilators and 20 ICU ventilators. It has also brought in four refrigerated trucks to handle the overflow of bodies.
The macabre scenes have made Guayaquil something of a warning for Latin America.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has taken some of the region’s most dramatic measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus, said the scenes from Ecuador should be a wake-up call.
“They said the pandemic wouldn’t hit Latin America so hard because we’re used to illnesses, because it’s hot, because the population is young, etc, etc,” he wrote on Twitter. “Look at what’s happening in Ecuador. If you don’t see yourself reflected in the mirror of Italy, Spain or New York, look at yourself in that one.”
Ecuador has one of the highest infection rates in all of Latin America, but the virus has been particularly cruel to Guayas, the province that is home to Guayaquil.
DRAMATIC DIFFERENCE
Of Ecuador’s 2,240 cases, 1,563 of them are in Guayas. If that single province were a country, it would have more coronavirus cases than every other nation in Latin America except Brazil and Chile, according to Pan American Health Organization data.
The country’s next largest outbreak is in Pichincha, where the capital, Quito, is located. But it only has 211 confirmed cases, according to the Ministry of Health.
Why the dramatic difference? Part of the problem seems to be unfortunate timing, public health officials said.
Guayaquil and Quito have different school calendars. In Guayaquil and along the coast, children were on vacation until after the Easter holiday. Many families were traveling in Europe and the United States, where the virus was spreading, officials said.
And the streets of Guayaquil were a festive breeding ground, said Zavala.
“Everybody was partying, schools and universities were out, and they were celebrating carnival and were getting ready for Holy Week,” he said. “People were on the beaches and on the streets, everywhere.”
In Quito and the highlands, by comparison, school was in session and it was business as usual — there was natural social distancing taking place.
Health Minister Juan Carlos Zevallos said that Guayaquil and Quito detected their first cases of the coronavirus around the same time, but while the population of Quito was generally compliant with the quarantine and other socialdistancing measures “a group of people [in Guayaquil] didn’t listen and we had an explosion in the viral load,” he said. “Now we have 10 times fewer cases in Quito than in Guayaquil.”
The spike in deaths — and generalized fear of dealing with the bodies — created its own crisis, said Jorge Wated, the government’s point man on the coronavirus in Guayas.
“The funeral homes have collapsed and the cemeteries have collapsed,” he said. “Now the government, for the first time that I can remember, has taken on the job of picking up bodies.”
Wated said he estimated there were still about 100 corpses in Guayaquil that needed collecting, but the administration’s goal is to clear bodies out within 24 hours.
It took Diego Diaz Chamba, a resident of Guayaquil, five days to bury his 79year-old mother, Elsa Maria Chamba. She died of cardiac arrest after a series of small strokes, unable to get admission into clogged hospitals.
“They told us the hospital was for the COVID-19 patients,” Diaz said in a telephone interview.
Over a period of days, Chamba’s sons tried to buy tanks of oxygen to keep her alive, seeing the price rise from $20 to $60 to simply unavailable. Once she died, funeral homes weren’t picking up the phone. At the cemetery there were long lines just to get on a waiting list to be buried.
“Every day it’s getting worse,” Diaz said. “We see them burning bodies on the street. Nobody is picking them up at the houses . ... The only option is to leave their loved ones on the street or at the hospital [if they died there].”
Maria Alexandra Torres, who works in finance and insurance in Guayaquil, described a city on the brink.
“The funeral homes don’t want to receive cadavers. The ambulances aren’t moving to pick them up,” she said in a voicemail message, describing bodies left outside in humid 90 F temperatures and saying she and others are seeing “things you couldn’t imagine. There is an absolute lack of control by the government.”
Responding to reports — and widely circulated videos — of bodies being burned on the street, officials said there was no evidence that it had happened. One widely shared video showed a man burning tires — not bodies, they said.
But with a 4 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew in place for Guayas, rumors and worries run rampant. And there’s the widespread impression that the true numbers of the sick and the dead are higher.
“We are in no man’s land,” said David Zambrano, a real estate agent and musician in Guayaquil. “It’s an insult to our intelligence to think that the government is telling the truth about official numbers.”
Ecuador was among the first countries to lock down its borders and halt international flights.
Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno declared a state of emergency on March 11, and days later imposed a curfew, canceled schools and ordered people to stay home.
But the population has often chafed at the rules — particularly along the coast, according to government figures.
During a national speech last week, Moreno blasted those who were still flouting social-distancing laws.
“It’s a crime, it’s terrorism,” he said of those ignoring the rules. “One or many lives will be lost due to your irresponsibility.”
Zavala, the paramedic, said the coronavirus crisis is playing out in strange ways. Some of the deaths being reported have nothing to do with the coronavirus, but are patients who fled hospitals for fear of getting the contagious disease only to die at home.
“The truth is, things are very complicated here,” he said. “This is hard.”
Jim Wyss: +305-299-9910, @jimwyss