"I'm Alive by Miracle"

(ATR) Jhon Zambrano is considered the first COVID-19 survivor in Ecuador.

Zambrano, a pediatrician, is the vice president of the Ecuadorian Olympic Committee and president of the National Handball Federation.

He was intubated for 20 days in a clinic in Guayaquil. Today, he still has certain problems speaking clearly due to the disease.

A few weeks ago, he underwent surgery for a closed trachea caused by having the tube inside his airway for almost three weeks.

He originally entered the intensive care unit on March 27.

"At three o’clock in the morning, I told my wife and three kids, ‘I’m going to be intubated, I hope to be back soon’. I’m a doctor and when this happens, all you know is that you depend on a machine and no one can assure if you’re coming back," says the 56-year old sports official.

All five members of the family were infected by the coronavirus but three were asymptomatic. Zambrano, the only one hospitalized, began to struggle with breathing and his daughter, an athlete who competed at the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima, lost her sense of smell.

More than a dozen Ecuadorian athletes in this Olympic cycle have tested positive for the coronavirus.

"Personally, as a doctor, I had to do seven years on call as a specialist, first in pediatrics and then as an allergy doctor for children. I can say candidly that I have seen children die (...), experiences that hit you hard in your professional life, but you do not live it. When it is your turn, it moves everything.

"You’re intubated, you’re not aware of anything," Zambrano recalls during a recent appearance on the ODESURTV channel, about the forum organized by the South American sports entity.

"I left the clinic on a walker, I couldn’t walk."

"Luckily, the pulmonary effects afterward were not much."

"In a group chat with doctors, I found out how bad it had been. They knew more things about more than two weeks of intubation than I knew."

Zambrano felt his life was in danger when Guayaquil smelled of death.

The Ecuadorian city of three million inhabitants was the first example of the COVID-19 horror in the Americas.

The situation in Guayaquil has been stabilizing since, but now, the hospitals in Quito are filling up.

Ecuador has recorded more than 87,000 cases and close to 6,000 deaths. Guayaquil has confirmed some 17,600 infections and more than 1,600 deaths, while Quito has certified more than 15,000 infected and more than 720 deaths.

Ecuador has a population of more than 17 million.

A few agree that the beginning of COVID’s community spread in Guayaquil took place at a football match on March 4 for the Copa Libertadores with 20,000 spectators in the stadium.

Zambrano survived. However, COVID won in the aggression of other prominent Ecuadorian executives such as Omar Quintana, a multifaceted high-performance expert, Silvio Devoto, former president of the local football club Barcelona, and Franklin Mazón, former representative of the same club and the Ecuadorian Olympic Committee.

Zambrano says he’s alive "by miracle", adding that the doctor who cared for him in the ICU had called his wife to tell her that his lungs were no longer responding.

"By the grace of God and by the affection of friends and family, I was able to go out and keep doing what I like: keep seeing my patients, being with family, sharing with the people of sport."

"And my only recommendation: until there is a vaccine, there is nothing to do but to take care of yourself."

Written by Miguel Hernandez

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