Nurse Raiana Almeida, 32, left her family in Porto Velho in January 2020 to join the task force of professionals who reinforced health teams in Amazonas for three months. It was the most critical period of the pandemic, and many patients died without oxygen in ICUs.
“I witnessed many deaths. Everyone who worked with Covid was not well and is still not well”, he says. When the family contracted the virus, she decided to return to Rondônia the following month.
In Porto Velho, he found “hospitals full of people, many vehicles circulating through the city and full health units”. Even with some improvement, a year later the nurse says she still sees many hospitalized, among whom a good part refuses to be vaccinated or did not complete the immunization cycle.
Rondônia is one of the Brazilian states with the highest capacity in ICUs for Covid this year. The state has already reached 92% occupancy of beds this month for the most critical cases.
The number of daily cases remained high, with an average of 2,247 between February 6 and 12, according to a survey by the Covid research group at the Federal University of Rondônia. There are already 6,972 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.
In recent weeks, housewife Angela Jaiker Maia has been with one of her four children in the field hospital. The structure, created in January 2021 to serve the excess of critical patients, has not yet been dismantled.
Maia is a resident of the south zone, in the Castanheira neighborhood, an area that had many deaths and cases of Covid last year. The 13-year-old son was hospitalized with pneumonia and influenza.
She says she had to go to the Public Ministry to get her son a bed. “He stayed in the ward, he didn’t have to go to the ICU. But I was afraid of being Covid and losing my son. In the field hospital there weren’t many people like last year, at least where I saw it”.
Nursing technician Lucas Rodrigues, 27, works at Cemetron (Rondônia Tropical Medicine Center), where the largest ICU structure is located. He says that working during the pandemic compromised his mental health. Since the beginning of the spread of Covid, he has been on the front line.
The health worker contracted the virus in March 2021 and soon after the mother was also infected, in the same period, but they were not hospitalized. Still, she continued working, but started taking sleeping pills.
“I had a lot of insomnia, I was treated with controlled medication to sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night, scared. I had nightmares about deaths”, he says.
The feeling remains. “I used to have a peaceful sleep, I slept peacefully. Now it’s different. Sometimes I control a little, I go outside the apartment, I breathe and I come back. I even calm down. It feels like despair, but I try to calm down.”
Lucas said the state government provides psychological support to all health care workers. “I need treatment, but I’m not ready yet.” He says he is afraid to face therapies.
Medical manager at the Rondônia field hospital, a doctor for ten years, Flori Menezes contracted Covid with his wife in November last year. The two had to be isolated from their children, but there was no need for hospitalization. He has also lost friends to the virus and seen many deaths among young and old.
“We worked in a scenario with many deaths, in addition to the usual. It was very different from everything we usually see on a daily basis. We ask that this pandemic never go back to the way it was before”.
The general practitioner says he and his colleagues could not stop working, even though they knew their mental health was not good.
“We worked because it was our mission to save someone in need, but also with a worried head, thinking: ‘I wonder if I’m going to be the next on the list of deaths? What about my family members?'”, says Menezes.
“We were working and the other day we found out that his colleague got worse and needed to be intubated. All the professionals were shaken”.
The current situation, according to him, is of more beds available and supplies than in 2021. The fatigue of the teams, however, weighs after two years of the pandemic.
Governor Marcos Rocha (PSL), an ally of President Jair Bolsonaro (PL), prohibited by means of a decree the compulsory vaccination and mandatory vaccination passport.
With the high capacity in ICUs, the scientific committee of the University of Rondônia recommends caution by the population. “The high level of contagion in the population has been generating outpatient and hospitalization demands, which have an impact on statistics and case forecasts”.
“There is an urgent need to disseminate and adopt effective strategies to achieve adequate vaccine coverage with two objectives: to protect the population from the evolution to serious cases and deaths by Covid-19 and, secondly, to prevent the emergence of new variants, which, in this case, they could perpetuate the current pandemic situation”, says the committee’s most recent scenario analysis report.
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