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Venezuelan migrants in Colombia returning toward Venezuela.
Millions of people have left Venezuela in recent years — more than a tenth of its population in fact — and there’s also been a medical brain drain that’s left the country with a sharp shortage of doctors.
Gottenger says a key concern right now is the troubling number of doctors in Venezuela who are contracting COVID-19 themselves — and dying from it. Four died last Wednesday alone in three different cities.
VAMA has started a GoFundMe campaign to get more personal protective equipment to Venezuelan doctors.
“Think about how much money you spend on coffee each day,” Gottenger says. “With that we can help a doctor for a month in Venezuela with PPE.”
Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro denies there’s a COVID crisis — even though the powerful head of his socialist party, Diosdado Cabello, is now infected.
Maduro blames new infections on Venezuelan migrants returning home from Colombia. (Many have lost what employment they could find there due to the pandemic’s economic jolt.) Last week he even suggested it was part of a Colombian plot.
“Thanks to the Colombia government,” Maduro claimed, “thousands of infected Venezuelans have re-entered the country through illegal crossing points to make us sick.” Some in Maduro’s government have even called those Venezuelans “bioterrorists.”
Public health experts say it’s likely some, if not many, returning migrants have tested positive for COVID-19 — but hardly to the extent of Maduro’s erratic conspiracy theories. Thousands of cases have been reported in Venezuelan cities like Ciudad Bolívar, for example, that are far from the Colombian border.
Meanwhile, they point out that his regime’s epic mismanagement and corruption is most responsible for Venezuela’s economic implosion— the worst in the world today — and the destruction of its health system.
What Maduro didn’t say last week was how he plans to fix the disaster that’s made Venezuelans so much more likely to become sick.
Source link : https://www.wlrn.org/show/latin-america-report/2020-07-27/venezuelas-health-system-was-already-destroyed-now-comes-the-covid-calamity
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Publish date : 2020-07-27 03:00:00
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