OXYGEN SHORTAGE LEAVES MEXICANS TO DIE AT HOME
Surge, distrust of hospitals have many families scrambling
Children call him begging for oxygen for their parents. Grandparents call gasping for air in the middle of the night. People with no cash offer him their cars instead.
Juan Carlos Hernández tells them all the same thing: He has no oxygen tanks left.
After surviving his own bout with the coronavirus and then losing his job, Hernández began selling oxygen tanks out of his car. Then a second wave of the coronavirus slammed into Mexico this winter and demand for oxygen exploded, spawning a national shortage of devices that deliver the lifesaving resource.
Prices spiked. A black market metastasized. Organized criminal groups began hijacking trucks filled with oxygen tanks, or stealing them at gunpoint from hospitals, according to media reports. And for a growing number of Mexicans, the odds of survival were suddenly in the hands of amateur oxygen sellers like Hernández.
“We are in the death market,” Hernández said. “If you don’t have money, you could lose your family member.”
The resurgence of the pandemic in Mexico left more people infected than ever — among them the country’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. With packed hospitals and a distrust of the health care system pushing many to face the disease at home, the number of casualties shot up. In January, Mexico recorded more than 30,000 deaths, the highest monthly toll to date.
Mexico’s total number of deaths from COVID is now the third highest worldwide, higher than India’s, a nation 10 times more populous.
Part of the reason so many more people are dying now, doctors and government officials say, is the shortage: There are simply not enough oxygen tanks.
“Oxygen right now is like water,” said Alejandro Castillo, a doctor who works at a public hospital in Mexico City. “It’s vital.”
New outbreaks across the globe have stretched the supply of oxygen in hospitals from Los Angeles to Lagos, Nigeria, but in Mexico, the scarcity is being felt inside people’s homes.
Eight in 10 hospital beds are full in Mexico City, the epicenter of the outbreak, and emergency rooms have been turning people away. Many patients refuse to seek medical care at all, driven by a fear of hospitals that runs deep in Mexico.
To survive at home, the sickest patients need to get purified oxygen pumped into their lungs 24 hours a day, sending friends and family members scrambling, often in vain, to find tanks and refill them multiple times a day.
David Menéndez Martínez had no idea how oxygen therapy worked until his mother became ill with COVID-19 in December. Now he knows that the smallest tank in Mexico can cost more than $800, up to 10 times more than in countries like the United States. The oxygen to fill it up costs about $10 — and can last as little as six hours.
Menéndez had a few tanks on loan from friends, but still spent hours waiting to refill them in lines that stretch across city blocks and have become a fixture in certain Mexico City neighborhoods.
“You see people arrive with their tanks and they want to get in front of the line and they end up crying, they’re desperate,” he said, recalling the pleas he heard: “My father is at 60 percent oxygen saturation. My brother is at 50 percent saturation. My wife can no longer breathe. She’s turning blue, her lips are blue, help me.”
Menéndez only thought of his mother. “I imagined my mom suffocating,” he said.
The outbreak in Mexico City began to f lare in December, after authorities delayed shutting down nonessential businesses for weeks, despite figures that, according to the government’s own rules, should have triggered an immediate lockdown. Officials eventually tightened restrictions in the capital, but then came the holidays, and many Mexicans defied government pleas to stay home.
In the first three weeks of January alone, demand for at-home oxygen nationwide rose by 700 percent, according to Ricardo Sheffield, head of Mexico’s federal consumer protection office.
As need spiked, prices tripled. Scammers proliferated online.
“The surge came out of absolutely nowhere,” said Sheffield, who noted that the price gouging worked only because people were so desperate. “If these people do not receive oxygen in time, they die.”
Mexicans are left to jostle for the limited supply of oxygen tanks being passed from household to household by entrepreneurial types like Juan Carlos Hernández.
Pacific Fleet leaders visited several San Diego-based ships Monday and Tuesday to begin a series of “standdowns” addressing extremism in the ranks. The standdowns were ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week.
The discussions come on the heels of two racist incidents on San Diego ships. Recently a Black sailor found a noose on his bunk on the guided-missile cruiser Lake Champlain.
And the Navy announced Tuesday that “hate speech graffiti” was found in a bathroom aboard the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, which is currently out to sea off the coast.
Adm. John Aquillino, the Hawaii-based commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and Fleet Master Chief James Honea, met with sailors on the Carl Vinson and the Lake Champlain, as well as several other San Diego-based ships and squadrons for what the Navy described as “candid discussions” on eliminating extremist ideologies in the military.
A Navy press release described some of the discussion.
“I have policies in the Pacific Fleet that we do not care what race you are, what creed you are, what god you pray to, what sexual orientation you are, or what gender you are,” Aquillino told sailors. “We are all Sailors, we are all shipmates, and we are here to serve our nation and defend the Constitution. I
owe you a safe place to work so that you can execute your mission and fulfill your oath.”
Aquillino and Honea met with members of the Vinson’s crew and its embarked air wing. Sailors told them about first-hand experiences
of discrimination in the Navy.
The admiral also addressed the entire crew via the ship’s public address system before leaving.
“Extremism in our Navy is unacceptable,” Aquilino said. “We will not tolerate it.
We will stomp this out, and we need your help to do it.”
Aquillino and Honea were not the only fleet leaders talking to sailors. Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener, the San Diego-based commander of Naval Surface Forces, visited several ships, including the guided-missile cruiser Cowpens, the landing helicopter assault ship Tripoli and the guided-missile destroyers Chafee and Stockdale.
“I need your help,” Kitchener told sailors. “I need you to reinforce that our sailors have a safe place to work. Our strength is our people — no matter who they are or where they come from.”
On Tuesday, just after the San Diego stand-downs, Chief of Naval Operations Mike Gilday released a message to the fleet on extremist behavior.
“Just in the past few weeks, there have been two separate incidents where symbols of hate and violence were anonymously left in living areas aboard ships in our Fleet,” Gilday wrote. “We must better understand the scope of the problem, get after this issue, and eliminate conduct that is driven by extremist beliefs. No doubt, this is a leadership issue. We will own this.”
On Feb. 3 Austin, the first Black man to become defense secretary, ordered the Navy, Air Force, Army and Marines to hold standdowns to address extremism and White nationalism within 60 days. Military leaders are under pressure to address extremism after current and former service members joined the thousands who participated in the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6.