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The Chilean authorities assured today that seven million people in Santiago de Chile will be locked up indefinitely.
Record of new daily cases, critical beds occupied 95%, increased circulation of the Brazilian and British variants and the capital in a total confinement. The second wave does not give truce in Chile and puts the country on the brink of hospital collapse, despite its successful vaccination process.
The health authorities announced this Thursday that the 14 neighborhoods of the capital that until now had freedom of movement during the week will go into total quarantine this Saturday, with which the 7 million residents of the capital will be locked up indefinitely, with all shops closed, except those of first necessity. In Santiago, other areas of the north and south of the country are added, so that about 16 of the 19 million Chileans (80% of the population) will be in quarantine.
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Last effort
“We are experiencing a worrying situation and we require a last effort,” the Minister of Health, Enrique Paris, acknowledged at a press conference. According to a study by the University of Chile, the Catholic University and the University of Concepción -three of the most prestigious in the country-, new cases have increased by 69.8% in the last four weeks and the occupation of intensive care beds it reaches 94.8% at a general level, with 67.2% occupancy by covid-19 patients.
In the last 24 hours, 7,023 new cases were registered, the second highest record in the entire pandemic after 7,084 last Saturday, and 122 deaths, bringing the total balance in a year to 954,762 infected and 22,524 deaths.
The positivity rate – the number of COVID-19 infections detected for every 100 PCR tests performed – is currently 9.6%, far from the 5% that the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends maintaining for two weeks in a row to consider the pandemic controlled.
In addition to the quarantines, the Chilean government announced new measures to enter the country and try to stop the expansion of the new variants: in recent days at least a hundred cases of the British and Brazilian ones, which are more contagious, have been detected.
“This is not the time for tourism,” said the government spokesman, Jaime Bellolio, after ruling out a new border closure such as that of 2020 and announcing that anyone who enters Chile from March 31 must first move to a transit hotel for 5 days and then carry out another 5 days of home quarantine.
How did you get there?
The second wave began in December with the arrival of the austral summer and worsened at the end of February, the month par excellence of the holidays, although the truth is that Chile never managed to control the first outbreak, which experienced its most critical moment between June and Last July, when the hospital network was at its limit and the positivity rate was around 40%.
Experts point out that what is currently happening is similar to what happened in Europe in September after the end of summer, when sanitary measures were relaxed so that citizens could enjoy their vacations and the tourism industry caught some air after months in red. “The global pandemic is growing again. At the national level we are in a crisis. It is necessary for the authorities to deliver a message that is coherent and consistent with reality ”, asked María Paz Bertoglia, an epidemiologist at the University of Chile.
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For Felipe Elorrieta, a mathematician at the University of Santiago, Chile has failed in the traceability of cases, despite having the highest testing rate in the region, with nearly 11 million PCRs carried out since the beginning of the crisis. “It is now four weeks that we have dropped from 2.9 contacts to 2.56 in the country and from 2.2 to 1.9 in the Metropolitan region. What is expected is that we will at least be able to find 5 contacts per case. Today we are far from that, “he explained.
The worsening of the second wave occurs at the same time that Chile carries out a successful vaccination process, thanks to which it has managed to immunize more than 6 million inhabitants with at least one dose (almost 40% of the target population), a figure that has put him at the forefront of immunization in the region.
According to the latest data from the University of Oxford, the country is the third in the world that has inoculated the highest percentage of the population, behind Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and the one that vaccinates the fastest, with 1.4 daily doses per 100 population.
However, the fast-paced vaccination rate could have played against Chile and led the population to overconfidence, compounded by fatigue after a year with restrictions. “The vaccine is a light of hope, however, we will have the herd effect in June. Before then, we have to continue taking care of ourselves because we have a high viral circulation ”, alerted Minister Paris.
