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During the morning of this Thursday, the second hearing began in the Seventh Guarantee Court, to hear the statement as a defendant of the former Minister of Health, Jaime Mañalich. The doctor faces an investigation for the alleged manipulation of the numbers of infected by Covid-19 and the eventual negligence in the control of the health emergency.
In this hearing, Mañalich basically repeated the same thing as in yesterday’s session, when he emphasized that he never intervened in the figures that were given to the public on infected, deceased and examined. But today there was constant friction between the representatives of the Public Ministry and the defense of the former minister made up of lawyers Gabriel Zaliasnik, Samuel Donoso and Luis Hermosilla, three of the most prominent criminal lawyers in the country. The team that defends Mañalich objected that the prosecutors asked the same question as in the previous session, which in their opinion, the former minister had already answered.
In any case, the former minister reiterated that the differences between the numbers of cases originate from a gap between what was reported by the laboratories in which the tests were carried out and the most backward data from the Epivigila del Minsal platform, updated from the data entered by the doctors themselves and health personnel. Mañalich explained that they decided to add more than 30 thousand cases, which were accumulated, when the results of a report from the Comptroller’s Office were known.
“We had figures of disagreement in relation to those who were confirmed in Epivigila by examinations in short, and by Epivigila’s own source. By the notification of the cases, it varied enormously from day to day. In this context, we took the agreement within the ministry that we were going to wait for the report from the Comptroller’s Office, of which I had partial and verbal information, and we took a single source to correct at once something that was transparently notified to the public in the epidemiological report and to the World Health Organization ”, assured Mañalich
The former minister emphasized that “I did not make any revision or correction of any number, not because I did not have the will to do so, but because I had no possibility, nor did it correspond to me to access the bases of said information. I don’t have access to Epivigila “emphasized Mañalich,
Jaime Mañalich, in a very relaxed tone and willing to respond, clarified that “we in the ministry, particularly myself, had great concern about the under-registration of cases in Epivigila, we generated a mechanism to find out from where to obtain information on more cases. In fact, if You review the written epidemiological report, point out that the sources of information are the Civil Registry, laboratories, etc. It is not only as it happened in the beginning, the mandatory notification through the Epivigila platform by medical surgeon professionals, but much more I have already pointed out that we ask for help from many people in institutions to try to understand and make the numbers better transparent, and in this context, information was accumulating regarding old cases not reported on the Epivigila platform, which the Comptroller’s Office identified as little more than 32 thousand cases “he explained.
The hearing will continue tomorrow with the intervention of the three plaintiffs Ramón Sepúlveda, Carolina Cubillos and Roberto Santa Cruz. Senator Alejandro Navarro, Mayor Daniel Jadue, and the Chilean Human Rights Commission filed a complaint in this case.
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