Brazil’s Manaus Recalls a Forgotten Pandemic Nightmare
In Manaus, the Brazilian Amazon’s capital, oxygen shortages once led to mass graves and unthinkable desperation during the COVID-19 crisis. Now, five years after the country’s first official pandemic death, residents who bore witness recount the bleakness and lingering scars.
A City Encased In Tragedy
Manaus, home to over two million people, sits amid one of the world’s largest rainforests—a setting famed for biodiversity and intense humidity. But during the COVID-19 onslaught, this urban sprawl in the Brazilian state of Amazonas became a byword for catastrophe. Hospitals overflowed with patients gasping for breath. Makeshift morgues could not keep up with the mounting dead. Families ran helplessly from one facility to another, desperate for oxygen or any medical supplies that could save loved ones.
In those agonizing months, entire neighborhoods plunged into grief, cut off from the rest of the country by Amazonian waters and limited road access. The situation was both unimaginable and, to those on the ground, terrifyingly real. The region’s climate—hot, humid, and confining—intensified the grim realities. Many families in Manaus survive on minimal incomes in crowded favelas, where social distancing is nearly impossible. Health officials and NGOs launched frantic calls for help, yet the urgency was met with patchwork solutions at best.
“Suddenly, everything had collapsed,” recalls Wellington Felipe Benfica, a 35-year-old driver for SOS Funeral, a public funeral service program, in an interview with EFE. “Bodies were everywhere—in hospitals, in people’s homes, even lying in the street. The system was overwhelmed.” The city’s pandemic story involves these memories, a permanent fixture, so critical that pictures displaying mass graves and hopeless families were viewed across the globe. The worst point happened amidst the second surge in January 2021. At this point, oxygen cylinders became empty. The Public Prosecutor’s Office states that at least 560 sick persons passed away because of suffocation. Though the city has since moved beyond the worst of it, the trauma remains etched in the minds of those who served on the front lines.
The Oxygen Crisis and Legal Fallout
Manaus’s second-wave crisis hinged on one brutal fact: the city simply did not have enough oxygen to treat its critically ill COVID-19 patients. “One day, we had it. The next, it was gone,” says Benfica, explaining to EFE how he witnessed families scrambling to fill their own cylinders or set up oxygen concentrators at home. Local authorities resorted to sending canisters via truck on unpaved roads—a 96-hour journey that caused irreparable delays. Many died waiting.
That decision is at the heart of an ongoing legal battle. Prosecutors are currently pursuing damages of up to 4,000 million reais (690 million dollars) from government authorities under then-President Jair Bolsonaro, who publicly dismissed the severity of the pandemic. The Public Prosecutor’s Office alleges that official negligence and poor coordination contributed to the “humanitarian tragedy” in Manaus. Bolsonaro’s denial of COVID-19 received a lot of coverage. This position, in the view of a lot of people, led to insufficient readiness. The legal case emphasizes errors in administration. Those errors amplified an already serious health event.
A particularly disturbing statistic came from the medical union. It was estimated that on January 14, 2021, around 60 people died from asphyxia on just that one day. The situation proved grim: complete families suffered losses quickly because oxygen supplies were depleted during treatment. In a city where tropical climate and geographical obstacles already complicate daily life, the pandemic’s second wave was the ultimate storm—an invisible foe that dismantled institutions and laid bare deep systemic flaws.
Forgotten Memories and Echoes Of Loss
Nine months before the second wave, Manaus had already endured a “surreal” first wave. Bulldozers dug common graves at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida public cemetery, capturing global attention and instilling fear among residents. “It felt like a war scene,” says José Roberto de Souza, age 57, who has spent 18 years working with SOS Funeral. In an EFE interview, he describes the scramble of families who flooded the program with phone calls, each needing to bury someone. “There was so much confusion—nobody knew what to do,” he explains.
De Souza’s team also suffered significant losses. “We lost our coordinator, our social worker, and several colleagues,” he laments. Like many frontline workers, he contracted the virus, took a brief leave to recover, and then came back to labor in the thick of the crisis. “Not helping wasn’t an option,” he notes gravely, “because families were desperate. They needed us to stay operational.” In the workshop, where white protective suits and coffins still line the walls, he recalls the magnitude of grief that passed through their doors.
Today, as Manaus tries to move on, the aftermath of those days lies in the quiet corners of the city. At the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery, a plaque reads: “Here rest the victims of COVID-19, 1st wave.” Beyond it, a field of grave markers stretches out, each cross once representing a life that ended too soon. Many are now broken or lying sideways, battered by time and neglect—silent vestiges of a tragedy that shaped an entire region and then receded from public memory. According to local officials, the sense of forgetting is painfully real. Although more than 700,000 COVID-19 deaths have been recorded nationwide, the pandemic’s peak horrors seem distant to many Brazilians.
Chile, Argentina, and other Latin American nations similarly endured staggering losses, but Manaus stands out for the sheer scale and speed of its devastation. Even now, some residents remain uneasy about whether the healthcare system is truly prepared for another potential crisis. In many favelas, water access is inconsistent, and electricity flickers on and off, making it difficult to store medication or maintain cooling for the sick. Local NGOs emphasize that stronger health policies and infrastructure investment remain crucial to preventing another catastrophe.
For people like Benfica and De Souza, the memory of families gasping for oxygen or waiting for an ambulance that never arrived will never fade. “Sometimes I close my eyes and still see them,” confides Benfica. “It made me value life more but also realize how quickly society can forget.” This pressure, the one there between remembering and moving ahead, reflects Manaus’s complex state. The city had a loss that was once viewed as unimaginable. The stories of those who carried bodies and buried loved ones could turn into a faded memory.
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Manaus stands as a cautionary tale, a testament to what happens when persistent inequalities meet a global emergency. Five years after Brazil’s first COVID-19 fatality, the city’s new normal is routine on the surface, yet haunted by echoes of tragedy. The battered crosses, untended graves, and fragile healthcare network all whisper a question: will Brazil take heed of Manaus’s painful lessons or let them slip away into oblivion? For those who worked day and night to provide funeral services or deliver oxygen, the hope is that the memory of that “surreal nightmare,” as they called it, might galvanize a country better prepared to face whatever comes next.
