Some Peruvians hope herbs will ward off COVID-19

A number of Peruvians are resorting to traditional medicines in the hope they will ward off or alleviate the symptoms of COVID-19.

One of them is artisan Olga Mori, who lives in a neighborhood without water or electricity near the presidential palace.

She says she relies more on an infusion of plants than on Peru's collapsed health system to protect herself from the coronavirus.

Although she claims she fell ill with COVID-19 twice, she never went to the hospital after seeing on television how many died after being admitted.

Instead, she stayed home and drank a mixture of eucalyptus, ginger, matico, onions, lemon, and honey.

In January, with the arrival of a new wave of infections, the hospitals collapsed and stopped receiving patients.

Many Peruvians then sought to protect themselves by preparing natural remedies and in the absence of money to buy drugs in pharmacies.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Peruvian Ministry of Health agreed that there is no scientific evidence that plants reduce the risk of contagion or symptoms of COVID-19.

But that does not persuade Mori, who was born in the Amazon, belongs to a family of the Shipibo-Konibo ethnic group and learned from her grandmother the healing power of plants, a knowledge that she brought with her when she migrated 25 years ago to the Cantagallo neighbourhood of Lima.

"We have to help each other to protect ourselves from the coronavirus", said Mori.

Ger neighbourhood is located in the capital of 10 million inhabitants, where 39% contracted the virus, according to official data from December.

The second wave of infections came in January with the appearance of the variants from Brazil and the United Kingdom.

Intensive care beds and emergency rooms were overcrowded and 100 tons of oxygen were lacking every day, key to recovery therapies.

The country began vaccinating health workers in February amid the scandal unleashed after it was made public that almost 500 privileged people had secretly applied the vaccine.

The rest of the millions of Peruvians do not know when they will be inoculated.

Left to their own devices and without doctors to consult, many face possible infections as best they can and make use of natural methods inherited from their ancestors to combat bronchial problems or colds.

In Lima's markets, citizens buy ginger and eucalyptus to prepare infusions.

Antonia Capcha, a 63-year-old housewife, began drinking them when her brother-in-law died in December from the virus.

"He hadn't taken care of himself", she recalled after buying a kilo of ginger, but she added that the deceased's family drank the infusion and nobody has been sick since.

In another neighbourhood in the southern part of Lima, Bertha Antezana cooks such plant infusions in a common pot where more than 100 people eat lunch, most of them unemployed or independent vendors made broke by the pandemic.

Born in the Andes, Antezana, 48, learned from her mother to cure her cough with a mixture of burnt sugar, eucalyptus, matico, garlic, onion and ginger.

She drinks it with her husband and her three children.

So far, Antezana has not been infected, but above all because she frequently washes her hands, bathes when she returns home, wears a mask and maintains a safe distance from her neighbours.

So far in Peru there have been 1.26 million cases of coronavirus and almost 44,500 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

(Image Credit: AP)