Chile goes from criticism to praise a year after detecting its first case

Like Argentina, Chile officially registered its first case of coronavirus on March 3, 2020. He was a 33-year-old doctor from San Javier commune who arrived in the country on a flight from Singapore and was admitted to Talca Regional Hospital. Then President Sebastián Piñera assured that his government had the tools to deal with the pandemic, but barely two months later, he backed down and admitted that “Chile was not prepared either”. Within weeks, the virus had spread uncontrollably throughout the Andean nation, and in June, with a collapsed health system, the country topped the ranking of deaths and cases per capita in Latin America and was among the most affected in the world.

The Chilean response model has been severely criticized. Early June, a group of 40 scientists asked Piñera for a change of strategy and urged him to act “preventively and not reactively”. Specialists also asked him to improve “massive and systematic testing” and intensify “isolation and timely closure of cities or regions.”

In the meantime, the health system exposed its structural problems, linked to its dual nature, where a private system participates and receives funding in the same way as the public sector, generating inequalities, and with a historical deficit of resources. Another major issue was the traceability of cases, which quickly got out of hand.

However, a year after the country reported its first case, the situation in Chile is completely different and the country is now among the top five in the world where more than a percentage of its population (18%) have injected at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, according to a classification of AFP from government data. And it is the sixth and only Latin American country in the classification of doses (one or two) administered per 100 inhabitants, with 19.15 doses, according to Our world in data.

Chille began to vaccinate the population on December 24, 2020. Forty days later and after a start that only considered medical staff, On February 3, the mass vaccination campaign began, free and voluntary, which exceeded 200,000 daily doses.

Thousands of people – initially adults over 90 before turning younger – began to attend vaccination centers set up in stadiums, primary health care centers, gymnasiums or public schools from that day on. Until yesterday, the total number of vaccinated was 3,529,523, or 23.5% of the target population of 15 million and over 18% of its total population of 19 million.

With these figures, Chilean authorities claim that nearly a quarter of the population likely to be vaccinated has been affected, which excludes children under 16, pregnant and breastfeeding women, as well as a group that does not do not want to be vaccinated.

The goal is to reach 15 million vaccinated before June 30. “It’s more than I imagined,” said the nurse who administered the first dose in the country, María Paz Herreros, 32, proud of her own record and the national total.

Chile was one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic in Latin America, with more than 820,000 infections and 20,000 confirmed deaths, and now ranks fifth in South America’s ranking of infections and deaths. per inhabitant. But its rapid vaccination process relies on having had the means to purchase the doses and a proven distribution strategy through a primary public health network, with a history since the 1950s in large-scale vaccination campaigns.

In mid-2020, when the coronavirus quarantined the whole country, the government of conservative Sebastián Piñera managed to secure more than 30 million doses for this year: 10 million with the American company Pzifer / BioNTech; 10 million more with the Chinese Sinovac (expandable to 20 million more in the years 2022 and 2023) and others with AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and the Covax platform, promoted by the World Health Organization.

However, it was essential to have the strong network of primary health care centers in most Chilean municipalities and the management of municipalities for vaccine distribution.

“Chile is a country very connected to the world (it has 29 different agreements with 65 economies) and this international vocation also translates into a search for opportunities where they want it”explained to AFP Rodrigo Yáñez, Undersecretary for International Economic Relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and head of negotiations for the purchase of vaccines.

He was “A very diversified strategy, to put the eggs in different baskets and in scenarios that could fail”, added.

Ambassadors, ministers and the president himself participated in the negotiations, which disbursement of nearly $ 300 million. After a surprising start, what awaits Chile is just as difficult. In three months, he has to vaccinate more than 10 million people against the coronavirus and also administer around eight million flu shots.

Until now, participation of the population has been high and rejection of vaccination remains low (less than 20% on average). “At first they came with a bit of fear, with various questions and doubts, but now people come without fear, they are well informed and have no doubts,” said nurse Herreros.

However, we are worried about a possible third wave of infections, as noted by the Minister of Health, Enrique Paris, who claimed that the country’s situation “is worrying”.

In an interview with the newspaper Mercury, Paris claimed to have observed in recent days “a non-homogeneous increase in cases; for example, in Magallanes and Los Lagos (south), they have decreased, but in Biobío or in the metropolitan area (center), there is an increase ”.

This increase occurs in the middle of increased hospital occupancy rate, which reached levels similar to peak infections, between May and June 2020, with more than 4,000 daily cases and more than 90% of bed occupancy in the metropolitan area, the main source of infection of the pandemic in the country.

Another expert who warns of a possible recurrence is Miguel O’Ryan, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Chile, who warned: “We are in a very thin balance right now or if we guard against fundamental measures an increase in March or April that exceeds what we had in the most critical periods of last year ”.

O’Ryan clarified that he is not trying to alarm but “to give this message please let us maintain the protective and care measures for a while longer, until the vaccines start. to take effect in the coming months “.

Amid debates over how to manage the pandemic and ahead of President Sebastián Piñera’s announcement to extend the disaster’s constitutional state of emergency, opposition senators are calling for discuss the feasibility of maintaining the curfew as a measure of isolation of the population.

Although Piñera classified the measure as “Absolutely necessary” Due to the pandemic, Senate Speaker Adriana Muñoz said the curfew was not necessary and announced “it will be up for debate.”

Another senator who showed his rejection of the measure was the socialist José Miguel Insulza, who said that “we don’t like the possibility of having more curfews because, I think, they are already quite unnecessary at this point, but we are all ready to discuss and talk about it ”.

The disaster’s constitutional state of emergency will end one year of implementation on March 18, as a measure to fight against the health crisis caused by the pandemic.

AFP and Telam agencies

THE NATION

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