The contagion curve in Argentina is increasingly steeper. Five months after declaring the mandatory quarantine, still in force, the Government of Alberto Fernández announced on Wednesday 10,550 cases of covid-19, a new record number, with which the total registered amounts to 370,188 and deaths total 7,944. The pandemic is not only accelerating, but is spreading throughout the country, beyond Buenos Aires and its metropolitan area, which until July accounted for almost 90% of infections. But the government has less and less room for maneuver to curb the spread of the coronavirus given the growing rejection of containment measures and growing political tension.
The mayor of Buenos Aires, the macrista Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, and the governor of the Buenos Aires province, the Peronist Axel Kicillof, hold periodic meetings with the president to decide the conditions of each fortnightly extension of the quarantine that has been in force since March 20. The three appear together before the cameras, but over the months the differences have increased. The latest disagreement has to do with the reopening of schools. Rodríguez Larreta presented this week a protocol to allow those students who have lost all contact with the school since face-to-face teaching was interrupted to return to class. If the rehearsal worked, then they would summon the seniors in primary and secondary school. But the Buenos Aires students will have to wait: the national government rejected the protocol.
Fernández has reiterated on numerous occasions that the confinement decreed when Argentina had only a handful of cases allowed the country to buy time to strengthen the health system and thus avoid the hospital collapse that occurred in European countries such as Spain and Italy. However, despite the significant increase in intensive care beds, their occupancy grows little by little and is already 66.7% in Buenos Aires and its metropolitan area.
After the total closure of March and April, the Government began to authorize the reopening of activities with strict prevention measures, such as the mandatory use of a mask, the limitation of the number of people who can enter a business or share a workspace and restricting public transportation service only to essential workers. But infections are still on the rise and the population's fed up grows, so that fewer and fewer people respect prohibitions such as getting together with family or friends.
Clandestine encounters have become the main source of contagion, according to the Government. “We need to prioritize riskier activities, activities in closed places, for a long time, with close people, without masks, carrying out intense actions such as speaking loudly, such as shouting, singing, laughing, or talking, coughing or sneezing without covering the mouth with the crease of the elbow. These are activities that, even if the person who is with us does not have symptoms, may be incubating the virus and we can be part of the transmission chain, ”said the Secretary of Access to Health, Carla Vizzotti, in the morning report on the evolution of covid-19 in Argentina.
We can laugh, sing and dance, in open spaces and with all the care.
If we do it in closed spaces, without ventilation and without a mask, we expose ourselves to becoming infected.
Our commitment is to inform to strengthen prevention and care.
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His words received criticism from opponents of the Government, who had called for a new protest mobilization in front of Congress after the massive crowd on August 17. Dozens of people displayed a huge Argentine flag in a symbolic hug to the legislative building, while hundreds more shouted slogans against the Peronist Executive and the vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The concentration coincided with the beginning of the session in the Upper House in which the judicial reform is expected to be approved. The opposition maintains that the initiative is a maneuver to ensure Fernández de Kirchner impunity in her corruption trials.
The judicial reform has finished reopening the rift between Peronists and anti-Peronists that had narrowed at the beginning of the quarantine, when Alberto Fernández's management of the pandemic had the approval of almost nine out of ten Argentines. Now, according to the latest survey by the consulting firm Management & Fit, the positive image of the president is less than 50%, while the negative has risen to 26.4%. The mayor of Buenos Aires surpasses him in popularity by two points — 47.8% compared to 49.7% - which contributes to placing him as the main leader of the opposition.
Information about the coronavirus
- Here you can follow the last hour on the evolution of the pandemic
- The coronavirus map: this is how cases grow day by day and country by country
- Questions and answers about the coronavirus
- Guide to action against the disease
- In case of symptoms, these are the phones that have been enabled in each Latin American country.