The toll of the coronavirus pandemic in Argentina exceeded 1,000 deaths on Saturday, the Health Ministry announced on Sunday. The total number of infections since the epidemic arrived in Argentina is 41,191, said the ministry, quoted by the official press agency Telam. The fatality rate, that is to say the number of deaths compared to the number of confirmed contaminations, rose to 2.4%, or 21.9 deaths per million inhabitants, said the undersecretary of health strategies, Alejandro Costa, quoted by Telam.
The contamination curve is going up in Argentina, and President Alberto Fernandez has limited his activities to avoid being hit, on the advice of his doctors. The measure concerning the president was taken due to "the increase in the number of positive cases registered in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, which shows a significant increase in viral circulation" , according to an official statement signed by Federico Saavedra, chief of the presidential medical unit. The head of state must "limit interpersonal contacts as much as possible," said the statement.
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Alberto Fernandez, 61, recently resumed his usual tours in the provinces, during which he is generally accompanied by delegations of government officials. In recent days, several cases of Covid-19 contamination have been revealed affecting officials and political leaders of power and the opposition.
According to officials cited by the information portal of the TN television channel, 95% of contamination cases that have appeared in the past 24 hours in Argentina have been recorded in the metropolitan area formed by the federal capital Buenos Aires and its periphery, an area where 14 million people live, out of a total Argentine population of almost 45 million.