When the first cases of COVID began to spread around the world in early 2020, people in Iquitos, a remote city in the Peruvian Amazon, weren’t unduly worried. They assumed their isolation would protect them. It didn’t. Peru, and Iquitos, were hit fast and hard.
In many wealthier parts of the world, states stepped in to help people whose livelihoods had disappeared. Not in Iquitos. The pandemic led to an extreme case of societal breakdown. In a surreal situation, people were left to fend for themselves, fighting to get hold of oxygen on the black market for their loved ones and forced to put themselves in danger to survive.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to a researcher who spent a year living in Iquitos, trying to understand what happened there during the pandemic. It serves as a warning that even after facing multiple crises, five years later, few places are ready for the radical reckoning needed to avoid the same thing happening again.
When Japhy Wilson began asking people in Iquitos of their memories about the first wave of COVID in March 2020, many mentioned the story of one man: Juan Pablo Vaquero, known locally as Uncle Covid.
This man who had been taken to the main hospital in the city at the height of the first wave, was pronounced dead. His sister wasn’t allowed to see his body. She had to return home and three days later he appeared at her front door, supposedly stinking of death. She asked what had happened to him, and he told her that he’d awoken in a pile of black garbage bags out in the jungle and had found his way home from there.
In 2022, Wilson, a lecturer in human-environment interactions at Bangor University in Wales, went to live in Iquitos for a year. He recently published research based on interviews he did with people in the city about their memories of the early stages of the pandemic.
I knew there’d been this huge disaster, but everyday life was just carrying on as normal. It was being kind of deliberately forgotten, and as soon as I started talking to people about it all kinds of extraordinary stories emerged. Almost everybody had lost at least one close family member during this first wave. I’ve done research in a lot of difficult, conflict situations in the past. But never had I encountered so many people breaking down in tears as they did in this case.
Listen to the conversation with Wilson on The Conversation Weekly podcast and read an article about his research.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware with assistance from Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.
Newsclips in this episode from Al Jazeera English, AP Archive, NBC News, The Guardian and CityNews. Thanks to Japhy Wilson for sharing audio clips from life in Iquitos, and from one of his interviews in the city.
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Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.