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The coronavirus, which leaves 233 victims in the country, has hit the regions differently. The central and western zones are the most affected, where Bogotá and the Valley top the lists of positive cases and deaths.
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After the country’s capital, the Valley, which has 816 cases and 49 deaths, is the region that most worries the authorities. There, the cases are concentrated in the center of the department, that is, Cali and its neighboring municipalities, but there are already 22 cases and one deceased in the port of Buenaventura, its main and populous city on the Pacific coast.
In Cali, Mayor Jorge Iván Ospina has received complaints that people are
violating the quarantine and, even, has indicated that patients with covid-19 have gone out to carry out errands in the city, endangering the other inhabitants.
In the capital of the Valley, according to the epidemiologist Lyda Osorio, Ph. D., the pandemic is running further east, where there is more population density and greater social and economic vulnerability.
Osorio explained that a first pattern of spread of the virus indicates that it entered the city through people who arrived from abroad, the so-called imported cases, and they were located in three sectors: the northeast, the southwest and the southeast, where it developed a microepidemic of covid-19.
In these sites, due to awareness and control activities carried out by the municipal administration, the epidemic was temporarily contained.
However, three other virus dissemination points were later generated: the Gran Limonar, Meléndez and the hillside (Siloé) areas. This focus of the infection later spread to San Fernando and the northern zone.
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After the identification of these two focal points of dissemination, a spatial dispersion was presented throughout the city. Today, the virus is present in practically all communes.
This is how the virus hits the coast
Vanexa Romero – EL TIEMPO
The region that continues to be affected is the Caribbean coast, where although there are cases in all the departments, infections are concentrated in its three main areas: Atlántico, Bolívar and Magdalena.
Cartagena (206 cases and 17 deceased) and Santa Marta (124 cases and 11 deceased), cities with a greater tourist vocation, are more affected than Barranquilla (101 cases and 5 deceased).
For the clinical epidemiologist Diana Girón, in the Caribbean, as in the whole country, there are many cases that remain to be reported.
“We do not know for sure how many cases there are currently; Not only does it happen in Colombia, it has also happened in other countries and underreporting of cases in all epidemics is relatively normal ”, Girón assured.
Among the list of the first ten regions with the most contagions, Risaralda and Meta surprise, which are above more populated regions, such as Santander and Norte de Santander.
In Risaralda, where the first infections were attributed to cases related to people who were in Spain, they shot up in the middle of the month after a massive contagion on the staff from the Los Rosales de Pereira clinic, where, until Friday, 40 positives were going, including 10 doctors.
In Meta, the focus has been on the Villavicencio prison, where they have detected 106 of the 186 cases in the entire department. There, the authorities have called for the expansion of the virus, which affects both inmates and members of the prison guard, to be controlled with tests, a situation that, up to now, is the most serious within the country’s prisons.
The case of Antioquia
And, although the country’s death rate (4.6 percent) is almost proportional to the number of cases in the regions, Antioquia sets a different trend.
This department, which registers 449 cases (the third region of the country), has a mortality rate of only 0.6 percent, since they only have 4 cases of death.
The mayor of Medellín, Daniel Quintero, has said that this has been achieved, among other reasons, thanks to the human talent that exists in hospitals and the use of technology to monitor patients with positive results.
For the municipality of Bello, the second locality where the highest number of infected persons has been identified, with 47 confirmed cases, a phenomenon very similar to that of its neighboring Medellín is presented.
The first infected were people who came from abroad and whose epidemiological fence was made judiciously. They were identified when they entered the country, isolated and examined.
They are followed by some health workers who work in Medellín and were sick because of their trade. Finally, there are infected citizens in the Retail Plaza, closed on April 14.
“Of the 10 cases we have, these are concentrated in three or four families,” explained Henry Pulido, an epidemiologist at the Bello Health Secretariat.That is where we have had great concern during these last days, because they are people who were going out on the street, they had permission to work because they are from the food area.
In this town, they do not rule out “capturing” more cases related to the food center, since the other focus of attention has already been controlled.
Santander also stands out, with 38 cases, two deaths and 23 recovered.
There, cases are concentrated in the Bucaramanga metropolitan area, and there is a small percentage in Barrancabermeja, where an Ecopetrol worker died earlier in the month.
In this region, the authorities have taken drastic measures during the quarantine, since only one person is allowed to leave, for his ID number, once a Monday to Friday to do shopping and bank errands, and on weekends nobody can leave their homes.
The panorama is more encouraging for other regions of the country, such as the eastern zone and the
small and remote villagesAs the statistics indicate that nearly 800 municipalities still do not register any contagion, among which are all those from five complete departments: Putumayo, Arauca, Guainía, Vaupés and Guaviare.
Local leaders of these regions highlight that the measures adopted during the quarantine at the national level have been useful to them. However, they do not rule out the risk they run if cases arise because they have poor hospital capacity. and they are far from the cities that have better health care centers.
And they fear that when the roads are opened in the country, contagions can reach these areas, since many live on tourism.
Four localities concentrate cases in Bogotá
The 2,152 infections that place Bogotá as the city with the most cases in Colombia are concentrated in four locations: Kennedy, Suba, Usaquén and Engativá. Of the total, 1,081 are women and 1,071 are men, and the age range that is most infected is 30 to 39 years, with 475 cases, followed by 20 to 29, with 487.
To date, 391 positive patients have been reported to have overcome the virus. Due to covid-19, 84 people have already died in the country’s capital, at this moment there are 39 critical cases in the ICU, 110 in hospitalization and 1,528 are in isolation at home.
NATION and BOGOTÁ *
