Argentine clinics struggle despite COVID-19 crisis
As COVID-19 deaths climb to new peaks in Argentina, the intensive care unit at the San Andres clinic in the administrative centre is oddly silent.The beds are empty. The monitors for the respirators are still in their factory wrappings. Cabinets stand filled with unused medicines and syringes. It has been that way for weeks now, even as other hospitals fill to capacity.
As the pandemic has swelled the necessity for hospital beds, many private clinics say they're struggling to survive. The pandemic has pushed away many non-COVID patients and the hospitals say they are losing profits on corona virus sufferers for the reason that government insurance program doesn't pay enough to meet up costs.
It's a problem that private hospitals have had in many elements of the world, like the United States, because of forced cancellation of more successful elective treatments to give attention to COVID-19 emergencies. About 10 private clinics in the higher Buenos Aires area have closed over the past year because of financial problems, eliminating capacity for 700 patients, according to an association of private clinics. Meanwhile, COVID deaths in Argentina topped 660 on Wednesday - the best yet in the pandemic - and hospital occupancy rates of 90%.
The closure of San Andres itself was precipitated by the death of the hospital's director and owner of COVID-19 in the very beginning of the year. As courts started out determining who should inherit, the potential heirs apparently were unwilling to step into an procedure running baffled. "They don't really want to keep with this open. They told us, 'The only thing we are inheriting are debts,'" said Alicia Rey, the principle of surgical services and a representative of the clinic's workers.
