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Abstract
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When the 15 bed clinic managed by Diego Posada started filling in mid-June, he received an elderly patient from a nearby town with severe respiratory conditions. Owing to a lack of equipment at the small clinic in rural northwestern Colombia, he sent the patient to the capital, Bogotá, where doctors could better treat her and hopefully save her from becoming the latest victim in Colombia's losing battle against covid-19.
The patient's son did not like the decision, however. He began taking photos of Posada, his car, and its number plate. "He said that if anything happened to his mother we were responsible, that we had family and that if his mother dies, we all die," says Posada.
People later visited Posada's clinic asking for his whereabouts and issued threats against him on local radio, claiming that covid-19 did not exist and that the hospital's doctors should be killed before they could kill or kidnap patients for financial gain.
"These things are public knowledge, but we never thought they would happen to us here, and they are, constantly," he says. "It is incredibly uncomfortable and unsettling. You don't want to think about it, but it makes you think about yourself, your family, and if it's worth it doing what you do."
Already facing the emotional and physical adversities of working on the front line in the battle against covid-19, healthcare workers are being subjected to threats, violence, and intimidation from the same public they are risking their lives to treat. Such aggressions have surged around the world in recent months under the weight of the pandemic, say doctors and non-governmental organisations monitoring the crisis.
In the Philippines, a hospital utility worker was attacked on the street and had bleach poured on his face.1 In India, health workers conducting covid-19 tests were pelted with stones. In Russia, ambulance workers were attacked by a mob. Organisations monitoring these incidents say that they are hard to quantify, and most go unreported.
In May, 13 medical and humanitarian organisations--including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Hospital Federation, and the World Medical Association--issued a declaration denouncing over 200 incidents of covid-19 related attacks on healthcare workers and health facilities worldwide during the pandemic.2 Yet shocking cases continue to emerge, many of which are from Latin America.
"We [watch] with great concern the increase in threats and aggressions to health personnel in Latin America," says Jose Antonio Bastos, health coordinator at ICRC Colombia. "Even in the absence of accurate data, the accumulation of social media and media information indicates that the situation of attacks on healthcare workers has worsened--both in number and nature--in Latin America since the arrival of covid-19"...
Language: en |