BRASILIA: One man in the Brazilian jungle city of Manaus, facing packed hospitals and scarce oxygen in the public health system, has survived COVID-19 in a makeshift ward at home, complete with air tanks his family scrambled to find.
There were no intensive care beds available for Osmar Magalhães a week ago, and no oxygen for new patients when his daughter rushed him to several hospitals.
So she took the 68-year-old former factory worker home while his son went out to buy a tank of oxygen on the black market. With the help of two therapists, they have managed to keep him alive while helping him recover his breathing.
“Thank goodness, I am better,” he told Reuters. “I began to feel better as soon as I got home.”
Osmar began to show COVID-19 symptoms on Jan. 2, his daughter Karoline said, just as a second wave of infections brought the city’s hospital system to its knees. Doctors fought to keep patients from suffocating to death when oxygen ran out.
“The hospitals could…