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Since mid-April, the Government has promoted a progressive return to face-to-face educational and work activities, along with the opening of large commerce. “The total number of active patients is tending to stabilize,” Piñera said. However, in addition to expressing a successful look that is unaware of the complexities of the pandemic, its plan lacks technical rigor. This is evidenced in that, for the recovered cases, they not only counted the dead, but also people who were still hospitalized seriously; the sensitivity of the PCR tests that are being used in Chile could be even lower than that already reported, due to problems associated with the kits purchased by Minsal and although progress has been made in the total number of daily examinations, these are still insufficient to achieve reliable traceability of infections.
But they will also tell us that mortality in Chile is still low compared to other countries. Although so far this is true, at the beginning the disease was concentrated in higher socioeconomic groups, healthier and with access to private health, and it is to be hoped that the panorama will change now that the contagion spreads rapidly through popular communes.
However, our public hospitals still support the gale well, and this is not only because we are far from reaching the peak of infections. In Chile, the public system has historically shown good results, despite an insufficient fiscal contribution, and during the pandemic it has not been otherwise. How is this explained? In part, because an efficient sanitary logic still prevails, with a public health perspective, which maintains solidarity and coverage even if you are unemployed, indigent or migrant without papers. And it has been against the grain of all post-dictatorship governments. If it were by the will of the right or its friends from the old Concertación, we would have, in Chile, with a high probability, a model like that of the United States, based on multi-insurance and with an important segment of the population without coverage, consulting late and thickening the mortality figures.
Therefore, the COVID-19 pandemic forces us to imagine and demand a New Health System, with universal coverage and 100% public, that distributes the available resources in a rational way to meet the needs of the entire population, against the interests of an industry that through Isapres and private clinics has diverted a large part of the financing destined for health directly into their pockets.
Surely, now that the number of infections is growing at worrying rates, the Government will back down in its attempt to force a return to “normality”. But when we raise it again, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the health of the population seems to matter less to them than the recovery of economic activity, which in a neoliberal system like ours translates into taking care of the interests of the main economic groups. Otherwise, there is no understanding of the concern about the opening of the malls or that the Employment Protection Law ends up making it easier for large companies to stop paying wages to their workers..
That is why, in the context of a health crisis that is still far from over and bearing in mind the social and economic consequences that come from it, we can only take care of ourselves, affirming ourselves in the social fabric that we have rebuilt during the last decades and with more strength since the October revolt. Mutual support and solidarity will continue to be our best guarantee to succeed in this adverse scenario.
- The content contained in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of The counter.
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