A Doctors Without Borders team was shocked by what they found when they arrived in Tefé, a thriving port town on the banks of the Amazon River.

“The hospital management team [told] me that almost 100 percent of their COVID-19 patients needing critical care had died,” said Dr. Bart Janssens, an emergency coordinator in Brazil. “They did not have enough specialist staff to care for the very sick patients that were arriving at their door.”

What they witnessed underscores a grim reality: Brazil has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. Between 15,000 and 30,000 people are diagnosed every day, and hundreds lose their lives. Furthermore, Brazil’s capacity to respond to the outbreak is being stretched beyond its limit with just one-tenth of the testing capacity of the United States. 

That’s why Doctors Without Borders is there. Our teams have launched COVID-19 emergency responses in Brazil—six as of this update—in diverse settings from rural areas like Tefé to huge cities like Rio de Janeiro, focusing on the most vulnerable and neglected communities, including those living in slums and favelas, those experiencing homelessness, and indigenous people.

“It is not a coincidence that Brazil is suffering so acutely,” said Ana de Lemos, executive director of MSF Brazil. “We have long known that Brazil is a country with enormous inequalities, but COVID-19 is exposing a health system plagued with structural inequalities and exclusion from care for huge numbers of poor or homeless people, and for regions such as Amazonia that have been starved of proper health investment for decades.”

We are working on how to best—and most responsibly—engage with remote communities in rural areas in Amazonas state. Our teams are working to improve health promotion by providing training for local leaders who can then share the knowledge within their communities and alleviate the burden on the country's collapsed health system.

Read more about this update on our emergency COVID-19 response in Brazil at doctorswithoutborders.org.