Guido Carelli Lynch
05/22/2020 - 19:51
- Clarín.com
- Politics
─ It's not a joke. This is life or death .
The phrase was repeated out of the microphone by several of the national officials who participated on Thursday in the meeting in Casa Rosada with leaders of the City and the Province. This Friday, in the anteroom of a new extension of the quarantine, the observation of the Nation's ministers, such as that of Transport Mario Meoni, reiterated it.
The president reiterated the observation in the afternoon, in Olivos, before the committee of infectious diseases advisers. "It is clear that you have to order public transport and mobility in AMBA, " said the president.
The gaze represents a change of position. A month ago the Government recorded that traffic ─ "a terrible enemy and one of the brutal mechanisms of the virus's expansion", in the words of Ginés González García─ in Greater Buenos Aires was on the increase. However, they relativized the impact.
The government endorsed more openness after that. "What changed in the metropolitan area is the speed of the curve and that people went out more to the street," Buenos Aires officials agreed.
In the last hours, the National Executive returned to spread the numbers of users on intercity public transport. Now they highlight that, although the transfer in trains, buses and subways fell by 76 percent compared to the days prior to the isolation, last Thursday the users who used public transport doubled: there were 536,136 more users than the first working Thursday of quarantine. The report clarifies that in all phases of the quarantine the flow of passengers was above 50 percent.
"Let's not promote consumption and the movement of people. We are talking about avoiding deaths . We can avoid contagion and death, and we have to work for that, "said Fernández before the watchful eye of Chief of Staff Santiago Cafiero; the vice-chief, Cecilia Todesca; the Minister of Health and his second, Carla Vizzotti; and of the Secretary General of the Presidency Julio Vitobello.
Expert committee members - Omar Sued, Pedro Cahn and Mirtha Roses, among others - agreed to strengthen controls on transportation. "It is essential," they narrowed down and asked for more controls, according to local officials.
The Government is considering closing intermediate railway stations in the Province and in the Capital. “In buses and on subways it is not the problem; the problems are the trains and the cars on the highways ”, they explain in the Province.
Police checkpoints will be carried out at 37 points in Greater Buenos Aires and on the highways. In addition, progress is being made in the re-registration of unique circulation certificates; in the application to book train tickets and in complementary bus services to lower the flow of passengers on the railway.
Meanwhile, Fernández again demanded greater concentration in the towns and settlements; as agreed with Governor Axel Kicillof and Prime Minister Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, on Wednesday.
"We have to face the work together and make a protocol in the emergency neighborhoods that gives their inhabitants confidence to solve the problem. We have to have a very firm gesture and deal with them. Let's do things differently, without making them feel like they're to blame. What they need must be brought to them, with more dignified conditions, ”sentenced the President, who this week received Ignacio Levy, from the Mighty Gorge after the death of leader Ramona Ortega, in Villa 31.
Meoni, meanwhile, was supervising the cruise terminal at that time, which the Government is adapting to carry out tests in neighborhood 31. Experts supported the Government's efforts in this regard and defended the extension of the quarantine. "The northern hemisphere did not have the variable of structural poverty that Argentina has, we must continue taking care throughout the country of places with large pockets of poverty," they noted the same day that the World Health Organization pointed out Latin America as new focus of coronavirus.
News in development