The period of relief and recovery of normality has ended in Bolivia.
Covid-19 strikes the Andean country again.
In recent days, there has been a rapid increase in cases: from dozens a day to more than a thousand on December 23.
Epidemiologists say the trend will continue to rise.
Government authorities speak of a "regrowth" and estimate that the acceleration of the disease will reach a new "peak" in February.
However, they refuse to decree a quarantine that would be rejected by various sectors.
One of the most horrible images of the pandemic has returned to the country: the Police have been collecting from homes, even from the streets, the bodies of people suspected of having contracted the virus.
For now, they are from people who for some reason did not want or could go to hospitals, as they still have beds available.
However, the intensive care units are again close to their maximum occupancy level, so there will soon be seriously ill patients who cannot be cared for.
In the last 14 days there have been more than 5,000 new cases, of which about 750 will be complicated, according to forecasts.
President Luis Arce, elected last October, has met with the governors of the nine departments or regions of the country to coordinate an action plan, at a time when the delicate situation of the economy makes it very difficult to adopt new restrictions to the mobility of people.
Arce wants to increase the number of tests to detect the presence of the virus, which is considered insufficient in all the studies on Bolivia's reaction to the pandemic.
It has also promised the importation of six million vaccines with a view to the first four months of 2021. The Government will allocate more than 80 million dollars to acquire these vaccines, which it hopes to buy from the different laboratories that have developed them.
The World Vaccine Access Mechanism (COVAX) will only allow Bolivia to obtain, free of charge, the doses necessary to cover 20% of its population, which as a whole is 11 million.
The opposition has backed the government's announcements, although a political storm is expected if vaccines have to be waited longer than promised.
Arce, who has been in charge of the government since November 8, blames her predecessor, Jeanine Áñez, for not having reached advance agreements with the drug-producing conglomerates.
The former president has replied that the only realistic solution to obtain these is the COVAX platform.
The Government is determined to face the outbreak of the covid without having to return to the exceptional measures, which were decreed last March, and which caused the worst recession that the country has suffered in peacetime.
Bolivia will end 2020 with a 10% decrease in the Gross Domestic Product.
In July, when the state of emergency was in full force, the unemployment rate was at 11%, double that of 2019. In recent months this indicator has been decreasing at the same rate at which confinement eased.
A pronounced recovery in economic activity was expected in the coming months, but this may be cut off by the second wave.
A new quarantine would also be rejected by the productive sectors, in particular the entrepreneurs, who make up the majority of the workforce.
People interviewed by the media, in the absence of a recent survey, mostly state that they have to continue working and that care must be personal.
Distancing measures have been greatly relaxed everywhere, particularly in rural areas, where they were never significant.
In Santa Cruz de la Sierra and El Alto, the most populous cities in the country and the hardest hit by the virus, many people have stopped wearing masks, which are missing even in the meetings to proclaim candidates for the municipal and departmental elections (regional ) that will take place in March, if the infections do not remain uncontrolled.
Politicians have stopped attacking each other for this reason, because bad behavior is general and there is no distinction between ideologies.
A woman told a local television station that Bolivians lost "their fear of the disease", that they already know how to "take care of themselves" with drugs such as ivermectin and chlorine dioxide, which are not scientifically proven but are recognized. as beneficial to recover from covid.
Going to these and other home solutions and supporting oneself in a community way with hyperimmune plasma transfusions has been the public response to the enormous deficiencies in public health services.
At least 140 doctors and nurses who treated patients with covid have died.