Brazil's hospitals running out of sedatives as COVID-19 rages - Reuters

Medical workers take care of patients in the emergency room of the Nossa Senhora da Conceicao hospital that is overcrowding because of the coronavirus outbreak, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, March 11, 2021.

Brazil's hospitals were running out of drugs needed to sedate COVID-19 patients on Thursday, with the government urgently seeking to import supplies amid reports of the seriously ill being tied down and intubated without effective sedatives.

The scenes playing out across Brazil, one of the countries hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, are placing growing international pressure on President Jair Bolsonaro.

Seriously ill COVID-19 patients struggling for breath are sedated in order to put them on ventilators, an intrusive practice the body can naturally resist.

The Albert Schweitzer hospital, through the press office of the city of Rio which runs it, said there was a shortage of intubation drugs but that substitutes were being used to ensure medical assistance was not compromised.

"More than one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the failed response in Brazil has caused a humanitarian catastrophe," said Christos Christou, a medical doctor and president of MSF, called Doctors Without Borders in English.

"Each week there is a grim new record of deaths and infections - the hospitals are overflowing and yet there is still no coordinated centralized response," Christou said in a briefing with reporters, adding that the situation was expected to become even worse in the weeks ahead.

MSF Director-General Meinie Nicolai said the surge in cases cannot be blamed only on the contagious Brazilian COVID-19 variant, known as P.1.

Argentina's government will tighten pandemic restrictions in and around the capital Buenos Aires to rein in a sharp spike in COVID-19 cases, including shutting schools and imposing a curfew from 8pm to limit social activity.