Delta variant causes Costa Rica to extend vaccination 3:28
(CNN Spanish) -
If Costa Ricans celebrated the centenary of their independence in the midst of an influenza pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu, the bicentennial of the republic is also marked by an emergency: the covid-19 pandemic.
According to the Costa Rican Ministry of Health, as of September 14, 5,851 people had died since the first case was registered on March 6, 2020, and there are 496,736 diagnosed cases.
The health authorities reported that in the week of September 5 to 11, deaths increased by almost 40% and hospital saturation is present, which is why they make a call to intensify health measures.
For these same reasons, the government reinstated the sanitary vehicle restriction starting at 9 pm local time from Saturday, September 18 and for the rest of the month, and the plan to alternate the circulation of cars with odd and even plates.
The centenary was also marked by a pandemic
It was, in any case, a very different panorama from 100 years ago.
Perhaps they only agree that both the bicentennial and centennial celebrations were staged in the Plaza Juan Mora Fernández, in the center of San José.
For the 1921 celebrations, says historian Arnoldo Moya, around 25,000 colones were invested, about $ 40 at today's exchange rate.
"We were in very difficult conditions, coming out of the Spanish flu and involved in a border war with Panama," he says.
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The country then declared a national emergency due to the influenza pandemic, which killed approximately 2,298 people, when Costa Rica had a population of around 500,000 people.
Today the country has about 5 million inhabitants.
But it was the cholera pandemic of 1856 that killed the most people in the country, according to Moya and the historian Franco Fernández, because it killed about 50,000 people, which represented, according to their calculations, around 10% of the population at that time.
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