Caracas hospital staff protest conditions, pay

Dozens of health workers at Caracas' University Hospital protested Wednesday over poor working conditions and low salaries.

Olymar Esculpi, a 43-year-old secretary in the hospital's oncology unit, said staff were being forced to reuse masks and buy their own gloves during the coronavirus pandemic.

"If you use a mask, you take it off, you have to throw it away and put on the new one, right? Here you have to reuse it," said Esculpi who has been working at the hospital for 15 years.

Esculpi said hospital staff have been paid low salaries for years, but things were "worse than ever".

She earns around $2 USD including bonuses, which is not enough to make a living in an economy that is practically dollarized.

Venezuela is plagued by four-digit inflation and prices are increasingly set in dollars instead of the local currency.

"(My salary) is not even enough to buy half a kilo of cheese," she said.

The South American country has recently seen a spike in COVID-19 cases, which the government has partially attributed to a virus variant that scientists believe originated in neighboring Brazil.

The increase has pushed already struggling hospitals to see more patients than at any other time during the pandemic.

In Venezuela -- where the coronavirus has not hit as hard as in other South American countries -- there are more than 167,500 positive cases and 1,678 deaths since the first two cases were detected on March 13, 2020.