05/01/2020 - 16:31
- Clarín.com
- Society
May 10 appears on the horizon of the Argentines as the new instance in which President Alberto Fernández will return to sit in front of the cameras to say how we continue to travel the coronavirus pandemic. If the quarantine is extended . And if it continues, until when. But there are already some voices that are beginning to anticipate that date, with the intention of postponing the end of compulsory isolation.
One of those voices is from the province of Buenos Aires, a district that a priori appeared as the most vulnerable to a Covid-19 outbreak, and yet has managed to control the social circulation of the virus so far. For this reason, Nicolás Kreplak, vice minister of Buenos Aires, assured that the quarantine must continue "as much as possible" , even until after winter.
Speaking to FM Concept, the official argued why the quarantine should be extended: "It gives us time for the winter to pass, for technological advances such as an effective treatment or the vaccine to appear. Meanwhile, the only effective strategy is isolation. We are looking for other alternatives, but there are not yet . "
Kreplak added that "even those countries that said you could not live like this and preferred to open like this had countless deaths and then had to close. If we want to privilege the economy it goes back to zero." In this way, it responded to demands for greater openness so that the economy could function again.
Kreplak said that the "success of the quarantine" translates into the availability of beds that the Buenos Aires health system has today. "When the pandemic started, we had 95 percent of the beds occupied. Now, as a result of the quarantine and that the scheduled surgeries have been suspended and there are fewer traffic accidents, the occupation of intensive care beds is below 30 percent. "
Regarding the capacity of beds, he explained that in total there are 11,723 beds in the Province, of which 5,667 are occupied and only 600 have patients with coronavirus. "But you cannot pretend to manage in such a predictable way the number of people who can leave the house and at the same time avoid an outbreak," the official said.
Coronavirus in Argentina
Source: Ministry of Health Infographic: Clarín
And he added: "If we release the isolation measures, we will go to that situation. There is not enough immunization in the population. You have to think about one extreme or the other. There are few cases and each case that happens are places that allow us to find all the contacts and isolate them , to turn off each of their foci. So there is no uncontrolled outbreak in a city. "
The Buenos Aires Minister of Health, Daniel Gollán, said this week that with this rate of growth of cases in the Province it would take "600 years" to reach collective immunity. In this regard, Kreplak pointed out: "We still have not found an alternative to change the quarantine for a better way."
In the Province 1,598 positive cases of coronavirus are registered , according to the last official report released this Thursday, out of a total of 4,428 throughout the country.
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