Venezuela: show discrepancies in covid-19 figures

They question sanitary measures in Venezuela 3:10

(CNN Spanish) -

Official figures from the Venezuelan government affirm that as of March 17, the country had 1,459 deaths from covid-19.

At the same time, the official balance of the Táchira state as of March 8 indicated that, in that jurisdiction bordering Colombia and which includes the San Cristóbal municipality, the deaths from the new coronavirus were 139.

However, the mayor of San Cristóbal, Gustavo Delgado, says that, according to his own official figures, only in that municipality a total of 849 victims of the disease have been reported since the state of emergency was declared on March 13, 2020.

This would represent 58.19% of the total number of deaths at the national level and 6.10 times more than the number of deaths reflected in the regional report.

According to statistics from 2015, San Cristóbal would have a population close to 283,000 inhabitants, while Táchira was close to 1.2 million and the population of Venezuela to 28.5 million.

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Gustavo Delgado, belonging to the opposition party Copei, explained that the Civil Registry, which is the guarantor of the delivery and storage of the death certificates in San Cristóbal, is under his responsibility, so he could affirm that the data is in the books.

“We have no problem with them being reviewed.

What we do is speak clearly to the people, "he said.

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Delgado affirmed that it is about 849 cases of deaths from Covid-19 in homes or hospitals.

"I do not want to fall into controversy regarding the figures because I have never hidden anything," he said.

Vaccination against covid-19 in Venezuela.

(Photo by Leonardo Fernandez Viloria / Getty Images)

The municipal official assured that the municipal cemetery only has 25% of useful life left, so they are working on a project for the construction of a new one.

CNN has not been able to independently confirm these figures.

At the moment there have been no complaints of this type in other municipalities of the country.

In the municipal elections of 2017, the opposition decided not to participate, considering that there was fraud in the regional elections and only some opposition political leaders joined the local contest, so the official party obtained 71.31% of the municipalities.

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CNN contacted the Ministry of Communication and Information, the Ministry of Health and the Vice Presidency of Venezuela to find out their reaction to the figures released by the mayor of San Cristóbal and the reason for the discrepancies, but so far we have not received a response.

The opposition leader Juan Guaidó has denounced that there is an underreporting in the numbers of infections and deaths from covid-19 in the country and that the "death figures offered by the government do not have any credibility" because in his opinion they are responsible for a system crisis and at the same time want to hide the truth about the impact of covid-19 in the country.

For its part, the Academy of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences of Venezuela has been warning about the limitations of the Venezuelan health system to process PCR tests and diagnose the coronavirus accurately.

Patricia Valenzuela, who is a member of the board of the Venezuelan Society of Infectious Diseases, agrees with that position, who stressed that everything has been concentrated in the National Institute of Hygiene, which, in her opinion, does not have the capacity to process all the tests that arrive from everything the country.

They consider that private laboratories should also be allowed to process the tests.

In recent months, some private companies have been offering the service for the majority of antigens, but it is not clear if there is a protocol for delivering a balance of results to the Ministry of Health.

In communication with CNN, at least two laboratories assured that the handling of the data is not shared with the government.

CNN tried unsuccessfully to contact the National Institute of Hygiene for their reaction on this issue.

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