Families like Fatima Castañeda’s, living in poverty, have to deal with COVID-19 alone. To avoid that, a medical brigade from the Mexican state of Jalisco comes to offer them home care.
The 16-year-old girl contacted them concerned about the symptoms of her relatives. “Right now my mother is seriously ill and my brother is also. Just my mother is a little more because of her age and my brother because of his overweight,” he says.
From his humble home of 40 square meters and without continuous drinking water service, they cannot maintain hygiene measures.
Dressed in individual protection suits, the NGO “Juntos contra el Dolor” volunteers They reach peripheral and marginalized areas where access to healthcare is almost impossible. In addition to caring for the sick, since the pandemic they have also disinfected the area to prevent the spread of the virus.
An accompaniment to the fear of death
The care they offer is also emotional. Its founder Silvia Lúa assures that many of the patients they attend are in a state of shock because they cannot go to a hospital. His mission, he says, is “give priority to prompt attention to the most serious, who does not have oxygen, who has no other resource not even to stock up on medicines because of their poverty, because of the periphery, because of marginalization. “
They also provide palliative care to “minimize suffocation, a feeling of suffocation, fear, anxiety, anguish due to the imminent death,” explains Lúa.
The initiative arose before the saturation of the hospitals in Jalisco. Mexico is the third country most affected by the pandemic with two million confirmed cases and almost 180,000 deaths.
– .
