‘Haiti is reeling:’ Earthquake survivors overwhelm hospitals in disaster-hit nation

CNN

By Matt Rivers, Etant Dupain and Jack Guy, CNN

Hospitals in Haiti are completely overwhelmed by survivors of Saturday’s 7.2-magnitude earthquake and urgently need help to treat them, medical staff say.

The quake, which struck the southwest of the country, left at least 1,941 people dead and more than 6,900 injured. That toll is expected to rise, but search and rescue efforts are being hampered by a lack of resources and by heavy rains, which have caused mudslides that blocked roads in the region.

At the main hospital in Jeremie, one of the harder hit cities, there were 84 people awaiting treatment at a facility that normally treats ten people in a day, CNN found during a visit on Tuesday.

Every bed was full, with patients also laid on the floor. Without evacuation to better equipped facilities, at least a third of them might lose limbs, or not survive, one doctor told CNN.

Jean Yves Dorvil pulled his 22-month-old daughter Evenson from the rubble himself, her femur shattered.

“My daughter is suffering and I don’t want her to lose her leg,” Dorvil told CNN.

“I’m very grateful to these doctors working with their bare hands.”

Other survivors were left to fend for themselves as Tropical Depression Grace brought heavy rain and strong winds to the same area hit by the earthquake.

Their homes destroyed, some tried to shelter under makeshift tents and tarps.

“We slept sitting down on chairs,” Theard Andrise told Reuters. “Nobody has come to help us.”

Aid has been flooding into the capital, Port-au-Prince, but getting it to affected areas has proven difficult due to mudslides.

“I’m in a lot of pain. We’ve been promised medicine. I went to look for it and I was told to wait,” Marimene Jouesil told Reuters. “Yesterday they distributed aid but I wasn’t able to get anything. “We have nothing to eat, we have nothing.”

The US Coast Guard is among a number of agencies on the ground assisting recovery efforts.

On Tuesday, the US Department of Defense announced it had formed a joint task force to assist USAID with disaster relief, while the United Nations and the European Union allocated $8 million and $3.5 million respectively in aid to Haiti.

The country, which is still reeling from the assassination of its late President Jovenel Moise in July, relies heavily on donor countries and organizations for its relief efforts.

The earthquake struck at 8:30 a.m. local time on Saturday, at a depth of approximately 10 kilometers (6.2 miles); its epicenter was around 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) northeast of Saint-Louis-du-Sud in the southwest part of the country.

Around 1.2 million people, including 540,000 children, have been impacted by the earthquake, according to UNICEF, the UN children’s agency.

The earthquake is just the latest challenge for the struggling island nation, which was devastated in 2010 by a 7.0-magnitude quake that killed an estimated 220,000 to 300,000 people.

“Little more than a decade on, Haiti is reeling once again. And this disaster coincides with political instability, rising gang violence, alarmingly high rates of malnutrition among children and the COVID-19 pandemic — for which Haiti has received just 500,000 doses, despite requiring far more,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore on Monday.

“It is now especially urgent to reach those impacted by the earthquake with vaccines.”

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