After coronavirus chaos, Manaus was thought to be the first city to reach herd immunity. Then a second wave hit

Once the ICU units in Manaus’s hospitals were fully occupied, the crisis spilled out into the corridors. Patients lying sideways on makeshift beds and breathing from oxygen cylinders lined the hallways as friends and family watched over them.

Outside, others were less fortunate. Some died at the hospital doors after having been denied entry. Some who decided to stay at home, where there was a bed available, choked to death. The city’s oxygen supplies were exhausted.

The chaos that swept Manaus in January — doctors performing manual ventilation on critical patients, families rushing to buy oxygen and graveyards struggling to keep up with burials — sounds like the result of a tragedy unforeseeable and unpreventable.

Yet experts had…