“Demand is growing faster than I can manage. Every month the number of patients grows exponentially. How can I plan for that?” said Marcilene Moura, the 45-year-old director of the general hospital in the Brazilian border state of Roraima. “What happens if this continues? I’m going to run out of supplies by the middle of the year.”
The flood of patients is also causing another crisis in Roraima, a poor and remote state that serves as the gateway into Brazil for Venezuelans: Roraima General does not have facilities to care for the bodies of patients who die there. It has resorted to sending corpses to the police station morgue, where they remain for up to three months while authorities try to identify them. The morgue, intended to house victims of violent crimes, is so overwhelmed that bodies are sometimes stacked two to a drawer, according to an employee who declined to give her name because she was not authorized to speak to the media.
The overcrowded morgue is just one example of how an unprecedented immigration wave from Venezuela is straining Brazil’s health-care system. Roraima General admitted 100 patients from Venezuela in September. By December, that number had doubled. To deal with the influx of patients, the hospital has transformed waiting rooms into patient wards, cramming in as many beds as will fit. But demand is so high that patients strapped to IVs lay in beds that spill out into the corridors. Moura said that she is blowing through the hospital’s annual budget in six months. Forty percent of the patients in her intensive-care unit are foreigners, and each costs her up to $1,500 a day.
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