The intensive care unit of the Oceánico public hospital in the Brazilian city of Niteroi was full of COVID-19 patients, and health workers were constantly on the move.
A dozen doctors, covered from head to toe in protective clothing and equipment, divide up the tasks. In front of a bed, one checks the vital signs of an old man and covers him with a blanket. Another updates patient information on a computer.
“He’ll come out of this,” a doctor told a sick elderly man as nurses prepared to hook him up on a respirator. “When he wakes up, everything will be over and he will go home.”
A team from The Associated Press visited the ICU at Niteroi hospital on Friday and found that all but one of its beds were occupied. The void was being prepared to receive a new patient.
Most of those admitted to the unit were connected to fans. The hospital, which has 140 ICU beds, was inaugurated in April and only cares for people with coronavirus.
Across Brazil, many hospitals are filling up with COVID-19 patients again. According to the authorities, the public health network of the city of Rio de Janeiro had an occupancy rate of 93% in intensive care beds on Friday. In other cities like Curitiba, in the south of the country, the UCis were also 93%.
The governor of the state of Sao Paulo, João Doria, announced on Monday that vaccination against the coronavirus in his region will begin on January 25. According to Doria, his government will make 4 million doses of CoronaVac available to other states, developed by Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac and which will be produced mainly at the Butantan Institute, a São Paulo state entity. The drug has not yet been approved by the Brazilian regulator.
The mayor of Niteroi, Rodrigo Neves, signed a document for the purchase of 1.1 million vaccines from Sao Paulo, one of the first cities to do so. Niteroi is next to Rio de Janeiro and has a population of over 500,000.
“The vaccine is the possibility of recovering our normal life,” Neves said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Doria is a political rival of the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has questioned the possible effectiveness of CoronaVac.
The federal government has an agreement to buy up to 100 million doses of the vaccine developed by Oxford and AstraZeneca if it works. But the Minister of Health, Eduardo Pazuello, said this week that both the Chinese and the Pfizer and BioNTech could be included in the national vaccination plan.
Brazil has confirmed more than 180,000 deaths from COVID-19, the second country in the world with the most fatalities from the pandemic after the United States.
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