1000's in Argentina die in solitude due to virus

Since the beginning of the pandemic, visits to patients with COVID-19 in Argentinian hospitals have been prohibited to avoid the spread of the coronavirus, creating a somber scenario: thousands of people have died in almost total solitude.

While most hospitals and clinics try to bridge the divide between relatives and patients using video calls, a small group of institutions are starting to allow visitations.

Psychologist Romina Tagnotta was hired at Centro Gallego in the middle of the pandemic after the clinic realized it needed a specialist to connect critically ill patients with their relatives.

Every day she walks inside the intensive care units, mobile phone at hand, organizing calls so that relatives can see their loved ones.

"We love you so much mom, you're going to get well, you're going to get strong, yes?" Sebastián Ezequiel Okada said in a WhatsApp video call to his mother Esther Nako, 77, who laid intubated in serious condition and died August 22nd.

Tagnotta says relatives are very grateful for her constant presence but fear that is not enough.

"The feeling of loneliness, not having been with the relative himself (at the hospital) is what changes death in these times of the pandemic," said Tagnotta.

The isolation protocol not only affects COVID-19 patients but in many hospitals across the country, such as in the Centro Gallego, critically ill patients without the new coronavirus cannot get visits either.

Fernanda Mariotti, 53, felt tormented by what she experienced with her mother Martha Pedrotti, who was infected in the nursing home where she lived and was admitted last month to another capital sanatorium with mild COVID -19 symptoms.

In tears, Mariotti told the AP that she insistently asked the doctor to allow her to visit her since the isolation deeply upset her, but always ran into the same answer as an insurmountable wall: the protocol prohibited it.

Mariotti is convinced that her mother's death, who died on July 20 of heart failure, was partly caused by sadness.

"My mother died of heart failure which I think was triggered by grief, loneliness, abandonment, fear, anguish," Mariotti said.

In order to change that, Mariotti started a petition online to humanize the treatment patients that has over 30,000 signatures so far.

The Mater Dei sanatorium in Buenos Aires is part of the growing number of medical centers in Argentina that allow relatives of certain COVID-19 patients to accompany them during their hospitalization.

There, Augusto Briceño, 59, was able to say farewell to his mother.

"Feeling her warm skin, her living body gave me peace me," Briceño told AP days ago when he remembered the day when, equipped with gloves, mask, face shield, and other means of protection, he stroked the head of his mother, Ines Nivia Frascino, who was irretrievably fading away.

This week the city government of Buenos Aires announced that it is studying the possibility of creating a protocol similar to Mater Dei's for all the city hospitals, eventually reaching hundreds of patients in the hardest hit region.

These policies of greater empathy with patients and relatives, come at a time in Argentina when infections and deaths have sharply increased.

Since the pandemic hit the South American country in March, there have been about 330,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and almost 7,000 deaths.