Venezuela's ruling Chavismo number two, Diosdado Cabello, announced Thursday that he had overcome the new coronavirus, a month after testing positive. Thanking God, Our Lady and "our wonderful people" for their "prayers" , among others, Diosdado Cabello, 57, wrote on Twitter that doctors now consider him "cured". He gave no details of the symptoms he was experiencing, but in a telephone conversation with President Nicolas Maduro broadcast on television on Monday, he appeared to speak with difficulty.
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“We will win!”, He concluded in his tweet, echoing one of the slogans of the party in power, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), of which he is the vice-president. The state-run AVN news agency then released a video of Diosdado Cabello where he is seen standing, waving at the door of a house, a black mask on his face. Disodado Cabello is also president of the National Constituent Assembly, made up only of Chavismo activists, and which effectively replaces the National Assembly, which has won over the opposition and chaired by Juan Guaido.
Diosdado Cabello was the first Chavist official to announce that he had Covid-19 in early July. Tareck El Aissami, the Minister of Petroleum, made the same announcement a little later. According to official figures, 22,299 cases of coronavirus have been recorded for 195 deaths linked to the disease in Venezuela, a country of 30 million inhabitants. But Human Rights Watch and the opposition say these figures are intentionally underestimated and hide a much more worrying reality. In an attempt to curb the spread of the virus, Nicolas Maduro decreed the country to be confined in mid-March when the first cases were detected.
