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After the increase in active cases and the alert for bed occupancy in Intensive Care Units (ICU) for patients with coronavirus, the Ministry of Health announced a series of measures in order to expand hospital capacity and reduce the speed of contagion.
The warnings that the experts and health authorities had been making are beginning to materialize. Having lowered our guard after the announcements about vaccination, the crowds during the last weeks of December, the meetings to celebrate Christmas and New Years and even the disorders during the soccer final between Santa Fe and America, led to them being new sanitary measures, which will take effect from Tuesday, January 5 at zero hours.
The mayor in charge and Secretary of Government, Luis Ernesto Gómez, and the Secretary of Health, Alejandro Gómez, gave a balance on the current situation of coronavirus in the capital. The first thing they highlighted is that the figures confirm that the city is going through a second peak of infections, after the first one that began to decline towards July.
The situation is especially serious in three localities: Suba, Usaquén and Engativá, where there are UPZ (Zonal Planning Units) in which more than 100 daily cases have been registered. In addition, the occupancy of beds available for Covid-19 patients in Intensive Care Units (ICU) is between 70% and 100% in most hospitals in these locations.
For these reasons, as of this Tuesday, January 5 and until January 18, a strict quarantine was decreed in the three localities that have the highest rates of contagion, in order to prevent ICU occupancy from reaching 90 %, as in the first peak of the pandemic.
“When we try to make decisions to protect people’s lives, we know that these measures have a social and economic cost, so we try to take the measures that have the lowest social cost. These localities have an increase of more than 50% in the transmissibility capacity and are presenting more than 100 cases per day, ”said the Secretary of Health.
In addition to the confinement, for the second peak of the pandemic, hospital measures and a seven-day isolation are foreseen for the almost two million residents of the capital who left the city at the end of the year and who return to the city, regardless of which location. The measures that will govern in these localities will be in force until February 18, with the same characteristics and exceptions of the restriction that applied between June and August, during the first peak of the pandemic.
That is, until then, only large supermarkets, pharmacies and stores that sell basic necessities will be able to operate. There will also be a ban on the sale of intoxicating beverages on weekends and only people who want to go out to stock up between 5:00 am and 8:00 pm can leave the house. Also, only those workers who provide essential services will be allowed to leave.
News in development …
