GoFundMe Or Death: Venezuelans Seek Online Help In Covid Pandemic

Four family members with Covid-19, zero savings and no relief from Venezuela's collapsed public health system: Gabriela Rodriguez saw no option but to seek help from crowdfunding.

She is one of a growing number of people in the inflation and sanctions-hammered country looking online for assistance on sites such as GoFundMe.

"This has been a nightmare, a horror," 31-year-old Rodriguez told AFP.

Having lost her job at a travel agency due to the pandemic, and making ends meet on $80 per month from a temporary job as a social media administrator, she quickly found herself responsible for her mother, 59, her grandparents aged 67 and 80 and a cousin, 52, all brought low by Covid-19.

Caring for them at home due to a shortage of hospital beds, she soon found herself in need of $300 per day just to pay for her family members' medicines.

She pawned her car, but this was not enough.

Rodriguez put a call out on GoFundMe for $5,000, and received $1,075 from donors -- money without which "I would be burying my mother now," Rodriguez said with a quivering voice.

Like the rest of South America, Venezuela is battling a harsh new pandemic wave fueled, authorities say, by more infectious virus variants from Brazil.

Officially, the country has had 165,000 cases and nearly 1,700 deaths, but observer groups such as Human Rights Watch question the numbers, which they say are likely vastly underestimated.

Finding a bed in a public hospital grows more difficult by the day, and the prices in private clinics -- from $1,000 to $3,000 per day -- are out of reach for most in this recession-hit country with a minimum wage of less than one dollar a month.

On the GoFundMe site there are more than 2,300 appeals for all types of support, mainly for money to buy medicine and oxygen tanks from Venezuelans largely fighting the epidemic on their own.

A well-known singer and even a politician are on the site asking for help with hospital fees, while a television presenter, also registered on the site, has since died.

"Help me to save my Mom's life," reads one of the entries. "Help my grandmother get through Covid-19," states another.

"I know that nobody has enough money... I would be very grateful if you could help with a donation, no matter how small," Rodriguez wrote in hers.

Maria Angelina Castillo went on GoFundMe last year, when Venezuela was in pandemic lockdown, looking for help to pay for cancer treatment at a time hospitals were overrun with coronavirus patients.

"There is no other way. It is GoFundMe or die," she said.

Jaime Lorenzo of the NGO Medicos Unidos Venezuela told AFP that demand for hospital beds was far outstripping supply.

"The collapse is massive," he said.

And Mauro Zambrano, a union leader, said "clinics are completely full, as are hospitals" in the capital Caracas.

The government aims to vaccinate 70 percent of its 30 million inhabitants this year, but has so far received fewer than a million doses. These are being given to health workers, teachers and government officials.

Caracas is demanding access to funds blocked abroad due to sanctions against Maduro, to buy more doses from the global Covax vaccine-sharing mechanism.

On Wednesday, Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza claimed in an interview with AFP that without the sanctions, "we would have been able to buy the 30 million vaccines the country needs three months ago."

Maduro's reelection in 2018 is viewed as fraudulent by much of the international community, who recognize opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country's acting president.

Washington has frozen millions of dollars of Venezuelan money in US bank accounts, handing control of the funds to Guaido.