Shocking scenes in Manaus, the city most affected by the coronavirus in Brazil

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window)
• Click to email a friend (Opens in a new window)

This is Manaus, the city hit by the pandemic 3:14

Manaus, Brazil (CNN) - The Amazonian city of Manaus has been dealing for weeks with a horror that the rest of Brazil has partially ignored on the advice of its president, Jair Bolsonaro.

It is unclear how the coronavirus, what Bolsonaro called a "little flu," came to this remote spot in the Amazon. He crossed the rich areas and then moved to the poorest. It is now affecting indigenous communities living in slums and slums.

These are some of the people we recently met and their stories.

Flights of mercy

The doors on either side of the plane open, as doctors with hazardous materials climb inside to reach seriously ill patients and take them to an ambulance. Manaus is not a city where you would like to be rescued - it is the most affected in Brazil by the coronavirus - but it still offers hope for the most seriously ill in the entire Amazon area.

Manaus has been greatly affected by the coronavirus, but it still has hospital space for the neediest patients transferred from the Amazon.

This flight brought two people from the river downstream in Parintins, a city with a population of just over 100,000 inhabitants some 370 km away. They need the medical attention that Manaus can provide. One of the patients, a man, can move with the help of doctors on a stretcher. With the other patient, a woman, the only movement is that of her chest as she breathes slowly.

The waiting ambulances carry both of them. The crew begins to clean and renew the plane. This team never lost a patient in mid-flight, although they had to intubate one in mid-air.

Dr. Selma Haddad is part of a team that takes the sickest patients to Manaus.

Dr. Selma Haddad takes off the protective clothing on the track and inhales. "It is very difficult. You carry a weight not seen. Every time I carry this weight. "

Constant pain

Workers have made hundreds of crosses to mark new graves at Parque Taruma Cemetery.

In the Parque Taruma cemetery, more than 1,500 graves have been excavated since the pandemic reached the Amazon. Men and heavy machinery sometimes work at night to meet demand, opening large trenches like mass graves.

Five coffins that arrive in just two hours are placed in a group grave.

Pedro Chaves said it was distressing not only to lose his mother but to have to wait for her to be buried.

Standing in mourning for his mother is Pedro Chaves, angry that he has to wait for the trench to fill up before covering the coffin. "We are here about 30 minutes waiting for more bodies," he says. "I just want to put my mom there and finish this. My family doesn't need this. "

Chaves says his mother died from complications of diabetes, not from the virus. Others say that covid-19 was not to blame for its losses. With so little evidence, it is impossible to know for sure.

As a constant parade of angry and distressed locals passes through the cemetery, workers sit in a corner, hammering out makeshift crossings and grave boundaries in the Amazonian damp.

Indigenous people fill the field hospital

Across town, in the newly built Gilberto Novaes field hospital, a line of new patients arrives. A dozen indigenous people from the outer limits of the city stumble from ambulances to wheelchairs and head straight for the ICU.

Health workers and patients fight coronavirus in the ICU of the Gilberto Novaes hospital.

The ICU is frantic, full of the sick and those trying to save them.

Circulating among the beds is Miqueias Moreira Kokama, the head of the Kokama indigenous community. It was named just two weeks ago when his father died of coronavirus.

"I took my father to the hospital where he was intubated for 5 days," he says. "Now we have 300 with symptoms and 30 in the hospital."

Deadly silent in the slums

In the Kokama community, the virus has emptied the streets. Resident Vanda Ortega Witoto points to each house on a path, identifying the families who are now isolating themselves.

On the next street, she explains that the deadly silence comes from everyone in the hospital.

At first they felt that their distance from the city gave them protection. But then the first symptoms appeared and the poor health of the poor neighborhoods helped the virus take hold.

Miqueias Moreira Kokama lost her father to the coronavirus and then had to lead her community.

However, aid did not come, Witoto says, while local officials said it was the duty of the federal government to help indigenous peoples and the federal government was doing nothing.

So when a relative started coughing, in pain and unable to stand up from a hammock, she put on a mask and gloves to take him to the hospital. "It was a very difficult time, exposing myself and seeking help for her."

The Kokama feel doubly threatened by the pandemic and the actions of the government they accuse of threatening their own existence.

Witito says that Bolsonaro "has been behaving in this pandemic with attacks on our territory, expelling indigenous peoples from their territories and opening our lands to agribusinesses."

At the end of the day, a moment of hope comforts the community. Witoto's mother, Brazileia Martiniano Barrozo, has been discharged from the hospital and is now returning to the streets echoing the celebratory fireworks and the cheers from the neighbors.

A city caught by the president's rhetoric

Manaus Mayor Arthur Virgilio Neto is not only fighting against the spread of covid-19, he is also caught up in a fight with President Bolsonaro, who called him a "piece of honey ***" at a cabinet meeting, the recording of which was released by the Supreme Court last week.

Virgilio Neto told us that he felt that "Bolsonaro's dream is to be a dictatorship, but he is too stupid."

He added that the president should "shut up and stay home," and that he was partially responsible for the increase in the death toll in Brazil due to the way in which he had dismissed the danger as a "small flu."

Pandemic