DUQUE DE CAXIAS – Specialists stood over intubated patients in the intensive care unit, reviewing charts and jotting down notes.
They conversed in low voices, barely audible amid the incessant beeps from patients' monitors. Two empty beds were in sight Saturday morning, but doctors at the Sao Jose hospital in a working class city just north of Rio de Janeiro said they would be occupied by afternoon.
It likely will be only a matter of days, or perhaps hours, until the rest are full, too, as the coronavirus spreads. “People are coming from all over,” José Carlos de Oliveira, health secretary for the city of Duque de Caxias, told The Associated Press in the hospital's parking lot. “This disease is not kidding around.