'I never saw him again': A suicide in Peru becomes yet another symbol of the despair caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the stark and seemingly growing inequities exposed by COVID-19 on its way to a worldwide death toll of 4 million.
FILE - In this June 25, 2021, file photo, a family member shovels dirt into the grave of Giro Quispe who died from complications related to the coronavirus, at El Cebollar cemetery, in Arequipa, Peru. COVID-19 has spread misery and despair and exposed stark global inequities on its way to 4 million dead worldwide.
At the hospital where Vilca died on June 24, a single doctor and three nurses were frantically rushing to treat 80 patients in an overcrowded, makeshift ward while Vilca gasped for breath because of an acute shortage of bottled oxygen.“He promised me he would make it,” said Nohemí Huanacchire, weeping over her husband’s casket in their half-built home with no electricity on the outskirts of Arequipa, Peru’s second-largest city. “But I never saw him again.
While vaccination campaigns in the U.S. and parts of Europe are ushering in a period of post-lockdown euphoria, and children there are being inoculated so that they can go back to summer camp and school, infection rates are still stubbornly high in many parts of South America and Southeast Asia. And multitudes in Africa remain unprotected because of severe vaccine shortages.
While the U.S. missed President Joe Biden’s goal of getting at least one shot into 70% of American adults by the Fourth of July, deaths nationwide are down sharply to around 200 per day, from a peak of over 3,400 per day in January. Peru has been one of the hardest hit by the virus, with the highest mortality of any country in the world as a percentage of its population.
From the hospital where Vilca took his life, “he’d call and say they were all abandoned. Nobody was paying attention,” his widow said, showing on her cellphone a photo her husband sent of himself in one of the rare moments he was lucky enough to have an oxygen mask.