Venezuela capital Caracas’ largest produce market is at the center of a worsening Covid-19 outbreak, but cash-strapped merchants refuse to stop hawking food there for the city’s five million residents, many of whom are starving.

“Caracas depends on this market,” its administrator Walter Rivera said in an interview, adding that about 17,000 tonnes of goods are sold there each month.

But the open-air bazaar, where people pay little heed to social distancing though most wear masks, upsets President Nicolas Maduro’s government’s efforts to stop an accelerating number of coronavirus cases from overloading Venezuela’s dilapidated health system.

It is a “potential site of high contagion” due to its lack of social distancing, Jose Manuel Olivares, a health advisor to opposition leader Juan Guaido, said in an interview, according to Reuters.