Health workers went on hunger strike on Tuesday in front of the Peruvian Ministry of Labor in the capital Lima. About a dozen doctors from the national social security union took part in the protests there, as the health system struggled to cope with a second wave of Covid-19.
“We have started a hunger strike,” said Teodoro Quinones, a doctor who took part in the protest, according to Reuters.
Quinones said the strike would last until Peru’s labor minister fired the country’s head of social health, Fiorella Molinelli, who oversees the government’s efforts to set up temporary health and isolation centers for Covid-19 patients.
Molinelli has not commented on the union’s demands since Thursday.
Protesters have sharply criticized the government’s approach to the pandemic and are calling for increased investment in the health sector.
“Our ICUs are collapsing and we are not receiving any response and we see the indifference of a government that allocates our budget,” Peruvian assistant Ketty Solier told Reuters on Tuesday.
“We urgently need to purchase this equipment to prevent the death of several Peruvians. The Peruvian state has a constitutional obligation to ensure the accessibility of health services and even now refuses access to hospitals because we no longer have the capacity to provide patients with so much need.” she added.
“People are infected, there are no intensive care beds, soon there will be no more hospitalization. Again we will see people dying on the streets. About the vaccine, we have no hope for the vaccine, we do not know when it will arrive,” he told Reuters Ronald Castañeda, a relative of a patient with Covid-19.
The occupancy rate of the ICU is 90% in some parts of Peru, according to the director of the Pan American Health Organization, Carissa Etienne, who described on Tuesday in a virtual press conference the health systems in difficulty throughout Latin America.
“It simply came to our notice then [of Covid-19 cases]. This wave is growing. I can tell you that we have made some calculations and we are more or less right if we were in the middle of April, and the figures continue to grow, “Health Minister Pilar Mazzetti told local media on Monday.
On Tuesday, Peru’s interim president, Francisco Sagasti, approved a decree to fund the establishment of more than 16 temporary isolation centers across the country and to hire additional staff to expand health services, according to a Health Ministry release note on Tuesday.
Sagasti became president in November 2020, becoming the third president to take the oath in just over a week, as the country struggles with political unrest amid the pandemic.