When Victoria Sanchez and her mother, Eufemia Nicolaza Sanches Pin, showed up at their local public hospital in Ecuador’s Guayaquil for Sanches Pin’s weekly dialysis treatment last month, hospital staff refused to let the mother, a diabetic, in because she had a runny nose.
Hospital staff worried it could be COVID-19 and said they could not risk exposing other patients in the dialysis ward, Sanchez says they told her.
With no money to go to a private clinic or pay for transportation fees to get to the other two public hospitals at the opposite end of the city, the mother and daughter went home.
A doctor later confirmed the runny nose was caused by a throat infection. Sanchez’s mother quickly grew too weak to move on her own. A week later, she was dead.
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