05/21/2020 - 13:14
- Clarín.com
- World
Peru was the first country in the region to enact a total quarantine at the national level, on March 16, which is still maintained, but has become the second country in Latin America, after Brazil, with more cases of coronavirus contagion. .
This Wednesday the barrier of 100,000 infected people passed. There are 104,020 cases reported. In the last 24 hours, there were 4,537 new cases, the second-highest increase in a single day so far in the pandemic. And the deceased are 3,024.
What is Coronavirus? How is it spread and what are its symptoms?
Watch the specialFaustino López was terrified to see his wife's health, hospitalized in late April by COVID-19 in a Lima hospital, worsen.
While his wife Angélica Berrocal remained in the hospital, Faustino only had to stay at home, where he lived alone. She stopped sleeping in the double bed they shared for 45 years, kept crying when looking at her clothes and listening to music in Quechua, the mother tongue of both.
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Faustino, a 68-year-old gardener, and Angélica, a 60-year-old sweeper, had reached this point in their lives without major health setbacks and with two healthy children and 11 grandchildren. But the new coronavirus annihilated the tranquility of this family that in more than four decades had never known misfortune. And yet another tragedy was yet to come.
At one point, Faustino had a fever and chills . He also felt the alteration of taste and smell, according to a clinical-epidemiological investigation file to which The Associated Press had access. They tested him and he tested positive .
An old family photo of Faustino López and his children were left at their home in Lima. / AP
Desperate, he knocked on the doors of a state shelter where nearly 2,000 sick from the virus are recovering. He was not accepted because he had not been referred from a hospital. He returned home and on the morning of May 5 drank muriatic acid and hanged himself with an electric cable.
Venezuelans to extract bodies
His eldest son found him and called the police, but Faustino remained in his living room for several hours without anyone wanting to touch him. Then came Jhoan Faneite and his adoptive son Luis Zerpa, two Venezuelans who work at the Piedrangel funeral home, which the city government hired to extract the bodies of people infected with the virus from the houses and then incinerate them.
Despite being the first country in Latin America to enact a total quarantine, Peru has come a long way. On Wednesday, it ranked 12th in the world in the number of confirmed diagnoses, above mainland China and below India.
And the true scope of the disaster is greater. With more than half of the cases not counted, according to the estimates of several experts, the authorities classify the coronavirus as the most devastating pandemic that has plagued the region since in 1492 the Europeans brought diseases such as smallpox and measles to America.
People die in their houses
Peruvians are dying by the hundreds in their homes, usually in areas near food markets that have become the most dangerous sources of contamination, according to authorities. And the task of collecting the bodies falls to people like Jhoan Faneite, 35, and Luis Zerpa, 21, who left Venezuela two years ago to flee the economic crisis that is raging there.
Luis Zerpa prepares to remove the body of Faustino Lopez./ AP
"Every day I entrust myself to God not to contaminate me," said Faneite, who worked as an electrician in his native Venezuela before emigrating to Peru, where until last month there were some 865,000 Venezuelan migrants.
From Monday to Sunday, even at night and early in the morning, the corpse gatherers drive funeral cars through the wealthy neighborhoods next to the Pacific, but they also go into crowded hills of slums where the virus hits hard, all dressed in protective suits and More expensive.
And so they came to Faustino's house to collect his body. A week later, his wife Angélica died in the hospital from the virus.
Another morning in early May they collected the body of Marcos Espinoza, a 51-year-old single and childless electrician who lived on a dusty hill near the Pachacámac archaeological complex, the most famous oracle in the Inca empire.
Venezuelans remove the body of another person killed by coronavirus. / AP
Óscar Espinoza, brother of the deceased, related that Marcos tried to heal himself by drinking eucalyptus water with ginger and lemon . His eyes ached as if they were pricked with a pen and shortly before he died he reviewed his life while urinating in a plastic bucket. "Why did I get this plague, if I didn't hurt anyone?" Oscar could hear, sleeping in the next room.
Marcos' death occurred early on Friday, May 8 at 2:45 in the morning. He lay on his side, curled up in his solitude and died in his sleep . Eight hours later, Faneite, Zerpa and another countryman, Luis Brito, 26, climbed the hill wearing white overalls, boots, double gloves and a mask that barely let them see their eyes.
Luis Zerpa, Luis Brito and Jhoan Faneite carry a body down the mountain, from a marginal neighborhood in Lima. / AP
Down the hill, they loaded Marcos's body and at times, to rest, they placed the corpse wrapped in a black cloth bag on the ground, while the wind blew, the dogs barked and the residents of the neighborhood without water or drainage watched silently the strange event.
Bodies in containers
Due to the increased mortality, the authorities have installed almost two dozen shipping containers in Lima hospitals that keep the bodies at zero degrees .
Luis Zerpa and the Peruvian Angelo Aza in a moment of rest. / AP
The Peruvian funeral home Piedrangel assumed a key role in Lima when no one dared to collect dead from the new virus. In March they picked up the first deceased in Peru by COVID-19, a psychologist who died in the solitude of his apartment in a building facing the Pacific.
Edgard Gonzales, one of the four brothers who owned the funeral home, consulted with his two children and took a risk. "You can open a door (opportunity), '' he told them. He was not mistaken.
Now the funeral home not only collects the infected bodies, but also cremates them in its two kilns installed inside a cemetery and distributes the ashes to the bereaved.
The funeral home not only collects the infected bodies, but also cremates them and distributes the ashes to the bereaved./ AP
Died looking at the wall
Ricardo Noriega, a 77-year-old clothing vendor, could not find a taxi driver to take him to the hospital when he became ill and no family member was available. Then, he sat in the main armchair of his living room and died looking at a wall where his family's photographs were hanging. There he was found by the staff of the Piedrangel funeral home.
Luis Zerpa, Faneite's son, his compatriot Alexander Carballo and Peruvian Angelo Aza wrapped Noriega's body as he lay on the caramel-colored ceramic floor next to the plastic carts and skates of his four young grandchildren.
Funeral home staff remove bodies of people killed by Covid-19. / AP
The weight of death is felt when Faneite and his colleagues at the Piedrangel funeral home tour the city. The soldiers who control the capital's roads are frightened away from the float when they confirm that they carry the bodies of victims of COVID-19. Some uniformed men, who in the midst of the pandemic must continue their work, cross themselves in silence.
More than 5,000 police officers have been diagnosed with the disease, with 92 deaths, out of a force of approximately 100,000. The army has suffered lower levels of the disease.
When Faneite returns home early in the morning, he finds his wife asleep with their two young children. Then she silently changes, showers, and washes her clothes with disinfectant.
Palmira Cortez watches without consolation as they take away her husband's body. / AP
Sometimes he gargles with salt water and when desperate with hydrogen peroxide.
He says he must stay healthy for his family and that includes his elderly parents who stayed waiting for him in Venezuela.
"Before they leave, before the inevitable comes, I want to go see them, I want to be with them," he said.
What went wrong
Peruvian authorities highlight that the country carried out more than 700,000 tests to detect the virus, the highest number in the region. There was also an early quarantine. So what happened?
The answer is that Peru is a country with 70 percent informality. Millions living on a day-to-day basis, and an inefficient state, unable to deliver aid - in money and food - to the most vulnerable population in a timely manner, and enforcing a rigorous quarantine has been difficult.
Street vendors work on a street during the quarantine in Lima./ Xinhua
The coronavirus started in early March in middle and upper class neighborhoods, with people arriving from abroad , but now it spreads in popular neighborhoods, where millions live in crowded, precarious houses, many without water .
Messy and crowded popular markets, long lines at banks to collect aid bonds and public transport are the main sources of contagion.
The precarious health system is at the limit, and in some regions of the country it has already collapsed.
The number of coronavirus cases - and deaths - tripled in relation to April 30, and relatives of the deceased and health personnel claim for the lack of equipment and medicines in public hospitals.
"It is like a horror movie, inside (of the hospital) it seems like a cemetery for the corpses, the patients die in their chairs , (or) in wheelchairs," says nurse Miguel Armas, of the Hipólito Unanue hospital in Lima, whose workers took to the streets on Wednesday to protest.
"There are already many infected workers, many dead, we do not have the security to survive in this pandemic," he added.
In Peru there are 7,533 patients hospitalized with covid-19, while crematoriums in cemeteries in Lima work day and night to incinerate the deceased due to this disease and lines of funeral cars are formed outside some hospitals in Callao.
With information from AP and RFI