Havana/“This disease has made you lose the notion of time and even logic. You don’t even know how many days you, your husband or your mother -in You do not see the news for the blackouts, nor do you have the Internet until the month is fulfilled to be able to make the next recharge. ” The text is not a claim hung on Facebook for an anonymous or a statement given to an independent medium, but an article published this Sunday in the Matanzas newspaper, Girón.
The province is in An epidemiological alert unprecedented from the Covid-19 pandemic, and the fact that such words appear in an official medium gives the measure of the despair of its inhabitants.
The note, signed by Raúl Navarro González, speaks not only of the symptoms (“You have lost your appetite, you have lost weight, you have lost strength in the hands and legs, and the terrible pains make you not want or get out of bed”) and the cost of medications in the black market (“the sheets no longer smell clean and yes to the last fever you sweat, at the rancid price of the blister mixed with the smell of the spiral that you burned and with that of the repellent of 10 usd that you rock your child’s body, with hope – by God! – that no mosquito infected it ”). And, also, of the suspicion that the condition has nothing to do with the Aedes aegyptidengue transmitter, Chikungunya and Oroopouche: “Being sweating under the mosquito net makes no sense because everyone is already infected, and it is also a luxury that you cannot allow.”
“You lament, a bad word, when you manage to take off from the mattress and put your feet on the floor”
The description is graphic: “You lament, a bad word, when you manage to take off from the mattress and put your feet on the floor. Then, when you take the first step, you get two tears. One, by the discomfort of the body. The other biggest falls through the pain in the soul, because of the helplessness you feel while you go through that hall that you feel narrow and dark as this island is infected.
The only praise of the text are for neighbors, many of whom “have come to know how they can help.” One of them informed that “they were finally collecting the garbage in some neighborhoods and that they were also fumigating,” says the author, who concludes: “This disease we suffer leaves an iron flavor too bitter.”
The testimony published in Girón is very similar to the one offered to 14ymedio Annia Zamora, mother of the political dam Sissi Abascal and resident in the small town of Carlos Rojas, in Matanzas. “The truth is that I cannot describe what we have spent here at home,” he says via telephone. “We could not get up even to give a glass of water to the other in the other bed. This has been very painful, very sad, it has affected us physically and psychologically, I cannot even walk from the pain and the inflammation that I have in my legs.”
The woman, who has been, like many other Cubans, carrying a disease to which they cannot give name because they do not know what it is, is sure of one thing: “The regime lies blatantly.” Your story offers a Sanitary panorama without palliative: “People are dying because of this virus.”
“It doesn’t happen the same, there are people who are having a lot of worse, it’s something strange that we had never seen.”
As for the symptoms, corroborates: muscle aches that prevent even walking – “The hands and feet are gathered” -, a fever that reaches 40 degrees, vomiting, diarrhea … “It does not happen the same, there are people who are having a lot of worse, it is something strange that we had never seen.”
Zamora asserts that, far from solving, the situation continues to get worse. Hospitals and polyclinics do not supply, and there are no medicines. “At this time I have a relative admitted to the Pediatric Hospital of the city of Matanzas, they had it in the hall on a stretcher, because the hospital is completely collapsed,” he denounces. “All the medication that a patient can take is because he looks for him in the black market or a person gives it to him, because in pharmacies there is nothing. Neither in hospitals there is a duralgina to put a child when he arrives with 39 fever.”
For the activist, it is an “incredible” situation, but more unlikely it seems “the ease with which the regime lies”: “No garbage is collected, it is not fumigated, everything is a lie.”
His words contradict the announcement of the authorities, which this Saturday claimed to have increased the “antivectorial struggle”, that is, fumigation against mosquito Aedes aegyptiand that “all municipalities have more organization.” In a note published in Granmathe Provincial Director of Hygiene, Epidemiology and Microbiology of Matanzas, Andrés Lamas AcevedoHe explains that in the province there is dengue transmission in 12 municipalities – all except Ciénaga de Zapata – and that the transmission of Chikungunya is also “certified”.
“It spreads from person to person, by air, the atmosphere, something happens and is at another level”
Similarly, he said that the priority is “active surveillance and confrontation to dengue”, which, unlike Chikungunya, can have a fatal outcome, although he did not report that there had been deceased in the territory. The Chikungunya clinical picture, he said, “is very spectacular,” but “people do not go to gravity or death for it.”
Now, he noticed that Chikungunya can be “concomitant” with dengue in the same person, so he encourages to go to the health service “so that the doctor evaluates the behavior to follow”, because, he warned, “we cannot self -medicate.”
Nothing mentioned the testimonies that have been multiplying in recent days, many of them collected by 14ymediothat allude to the impossibility of an accurate diagnosis by the absence of reagents. From the same Matanzas, Miguel Alejandro Guerra Domínguez, doctor and victim of scarcity at the Cárdenas Territorial Hospital, denounced in his social networks that they had not performed the exams required for the evolution and monitoring of his illness. “A hospital that does not guarantee the basics for the diagnosis and monitoring of dengue is severely failing to its population,” he said on his Facebook page.
The more than 700 comments left by users in the publication of Girón In networks They reaffirm the severity of the situation and abound in generalized suspicions. One of them is even surprised that an official newspaper offers a text like this: “The newspaper Girón has a smell of 14ymedio”, Says with sneer Yobanis Herrera.
“21 days ago it started and did it for pain in my hands and neck, then extended and came high fever, itching, lack of appetite”
Maritza Catalina Rodríguez, on the other hand, adventure: “I in my humble opinion I do not think it is a mosquito, I am leaving more for a disease such as rubella, paperras, measles, contagious diseases and very rapid propagation.” With it, many other commentators agree, such as Jeny Dacal: “I totally agree, it spread from person to person, for the air, the atmosphere, something happens and is to another level, it is something that attacks the complete nervous system and gives a feeling of almost dying, it gave me and I am 34 years Sure ”.
The responses are not only from Matanceros, but of residents in Cienfuegos, Ciego de Ávila, Villa Clara, Guantánamo, Havana and other provinces. Several of the users allud that it can be scarleting, a disease, the communicator assures José Luis Tan Estradacases are being recorded in Camagüey.
Without knowing for sure what attacks them, the patients can only describe the symptoms, similar among them: “21 days ago it started me and did it by pain in my hands and neck, then it extended and came high fever, itching, lack of appetite. Taking Paracetamol. Will it be chronic? ”Asks Adelfa García, from Matanzas.
Some others allude to the hardness with which the same province hit the Covid-19 pandemia More than four years ago. The situation reached the boundary between June and July 2021, precisely in the days prior to the 11J demonstrations, in which the Matanceros participated massively and that were especially intense in the municipality of Cárdenas.
Hildolydia Martell thus summed up the state of the matter in his comment: “In my block we have suffered and still suffering the virus all. But they waited with the unhealthiness and the shortcomings in which we are surviving, well if this can be called to survive. Yesterday when I returned from the polyclinic a man told me: We are dead and we have not realized. He replied: ‘We are dead that we breathe’. ”
