Coronavirus: Paraguay tops the list of deaths per million …

With 7.3 million inhabitants, Paraguay topped 400,000 infections and 11,000 deaths since the first case of covid-19 was reported in March 2020. In the past two weeks, it ranks as the country with the highest mortality in the world, with a rate of 24.79 deaths per 100,000 population.

Paraguay’s health ministry on Friday warned of rising deaths as citizens prepare for Sunday’s internal elections. The health ministry called for safer campaigns and adherence to sanitary measures during the elections, they also reported that around 100 candidates in the upcoming elections have died from covid-19.

The director of health surveillance, Guillermo Sequera, acknowledged during the weekly press conference that “Paraguay is leading these days” in terms of mortality per million inhabitants. “All countries were at one point in the first place in mortality, the important thing is not to spend a lot of time there,” he said.

Sequera also commented that over the past week he saw a 9 percent drop in cases, although he insisted we can’t talk about a drop yet because for that they need three consecutive weeks with a downward trend. For now, this reduction may be due to “a temporary situation” and to “very circumstantial” causes, the health official said.

Thanks to last week’s drop, Paraguay fell to second place among the countries with the most deaths per million population. According to the portal Our Data World from Oxford University, Paraguay, with 17.67 deaths per million, this week was late Suriname (12.66, although its population does not reach the million).

93 percent of Paraguay’s districts recorded cases last week, in total there are believed to be 242 districts, “And 128 are with a level 4 (contagion), the highest level of community circulation,” Sequera warned, who again recommended limiting social gatherings. “If you don’t take care of yourself, there will be massive contagion (…). You have to take care of yourself as if you were a carrier of the virus,” he recalled. Hospitals across the country are overwhelmed and oxygen is currently lacking, as are some medicines.

On the other hand, the official confirmed this Friday two deaths of people who had already received the vaccine but who had not yet generated immunity. “They have to spend between 15 and 21 days until you are immunized. They were sick at the time of the vaccination,” he added.. One of the deceased started the disease on the day he received the second dose and the other one the day after the end of the diet.

Sequera invited the population to attend the vaccinations and gave the data of vaccinated health workers as an example of the vaccine’s effectiveness, with fewer cases two or three weeks after completing both doses.

Contagions and elections

On the other hand, the director of Health Surveillance, also warned against infections during political campaigns. “We are concerned about political campaigns, not so much the act of voting, but rather irresponsible campaigns,” Sequera said. “According to data from the Superior Court of Electoral Justice, 17,000 candidates have been tested for Covid-19, more than 8,000 have tested positive and 96 candidates have died,” he explained.

“In the world, not all countries stopped their elections, but their political campaigns did. We couldn’t, but we gave some recommendations on how to do it. 96 deceased candidates. Hopefully Sunday, polling day, will not be a day when we will add more deaths, not only of candidates, but also of voters, ”added Sequera.

This Sunday, Paraguay will have internal party elections in which the candidates who contest the positions of mayors and councilors in the municipal elections on October 10 will be chosen.

Few vaccines

For him Executive Director of the Red Cross, Arturo Ojeda, the current epidemiological situation is linked to the relaxation of health measures to avoid contagion of covid-19. “The population did not respect the established sanitary measures and also the government lowered its guard to the controls”, he claimed. “We had projections of some 7,000 deaths for July. We are in the first half of June and we have already passed 11,000. The numbers are very worrying,” Ojeda said.

For his part, the epidemiologist Thomas Mateo Balmelli He said that “in January, around 35,000 Paraguayans went to Brazil on vacation and many of them acquired the different variants of the virus” that are most contagious. Regarding the acquisition of vaccines, for Balmelli the Paraguayan government was wrong to “blindly trust” the purchase of vaccines via the Covax system of the World Health Organization. Faced with this delay, the country used the donations it received from countries in Europe, Asia and America.

“Vaccination continues to be slow due to a shortage of vaccines. The government must withdraw all stock it has until it is exhausted and not slow down vaccination,” Balmelli said. Paraguay has so far received around 450,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, 250,000 from Sinopharm, 20,000 from Coronavac, 200,000 from Covaxin, 100,000 from Moderna and 40,000 from Sputnik-V.

“It’s a walk-in vaccination. If we continue at this rate, in three years we will reach the 75 percent needed to stop the pandemic epidemic,” said the epidemiologist. “No one can say ‘I’m already vaccinated’ if they’ve only received the first dose,” Balmelli warned.

According to official figures, currently 6.7 inhabitants of the population have received the first dose and only 1.2 percent both of which ensure a full vaccination. The goal is to reach 30% in December and 75% of the population by 2023.