BRASIL / REPORTING FOR HOPEOnlus

On assignment for HOPE Onlus (one of the most active reality in support of the Italian Health System during the first months of pandemic) I documented the second phase of the biggest Italian operation of humanitarian help in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic. After the Pope’s appeal, Paolo Taccone, Intensive Therapy's medical manager at Policlinico di Milano, and the Wolrd Bank economist Antonio Guizzetti have delivered for Hope 18 intensive care beds and ventilators and 6 portable ultrasound machines to six hospitals in the poorest Brazilian states, those ones that were not equipped to face the pandemic. For the second phase, Antonio Guizzetti and I have traveled in early september through the State of Pará visiting hospitals and small villages of Amazonia, land of contradiction, the richestin natural resources, but the the poorest and the most isolated region with a limited access to health care. The limited COVID-19 testing delivered by Brazil’s central authorities made tracking the pandemic’s spread across the vast country difficult, especially in the Amazon Forest, where there are no official estimates about deaths for COVID-19. The Bolsonaro’s denial about coronavirus has been reflected, mainly in native communities, into a refusal of help. The transmission of the virus in the inner and remote regions have intensified the ongoing historical process of elimination of indigenous and quilimobola people, who have hardly access to a structured health system.