Chile announced a “mobility pass” that will grant greater freedoms to people vaccinated against the coronavirus

Chile announced on Sunday that A “mobility pass” will come into effect this week which will grant greater freedoms to people who have received doses of the coronavirus vaccine.

“Vaccination is not an individual decision to protect the health of those vaccinated, it is an act of solidarity to protect the lives of their families and communities,” said President Sebastián Piñera.

The mobility pass is a digital identification that can be obtained by vaccinated people who are in quarantined areas, a restriction that applies across most of the country Monday through Friday due to a second wave of the pandemic that worsened in March.

“These increased freedoms and mobility will be extended depending on sanitary conditions and the recommendations of experts”, said the head of state.

Chile recorded 2,980 infected with covid-19 in intensive care units on Sunday, a figure that remained below 3,000 for ten days and that it has not increased despite the rebound in infections recorded last week.

With the arrival of May, the country seems to be emerging from a second wave that has put the hospital system on the ropes and forced to confine 90% of the population. The number of daily cases stabilized and hospitals began to decongest.

Authorities have started a gradual opening process, delaying the curfew – which now applies between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. – and lifted quarantines in dozens of neighborhoods across the country that They were able to open bars, restaurants and non-essential stores during the week after a month in lockdown.

However and despite the progress of the vaccination process, one of the fastest in the world, In recent days, new infections have increased again, reaching over 6,500.

In the past 24 hours, 6,519 cases and 132 new deaths have been added, leaving the total pandemic balance in more than 1.3 million infections and 28,518 total deaths.

At the same time, admissions to intensive care units of vaccinated groups declined and the risk of hospitalization fell from 2.3% to 0.5% in young people aged 30 to 39 and from 17% to 33% in the over 70s, according to figures from the Ministry of Health.

The vaccination process in the country continues to be among the most successful in the world: two doses were administered to 51% of the population and one dose to more than 63%, mainly from the vaccine from the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, and to a lesser extent from Pfizer and AstraZeneca. In official figures, 7.6 million people have both doses and 9.6 million have received at least one.

Chile is the second country with the highest percentage of fully vaccinated people behind Israel, according to data from the University of Oxford.

On Sunday, the country received the largest shipment of anti-covid-19 vaccines to date, with 2.2 million doses of Coronavac, from the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, bringing the total number of vaccines received to more than 21 million since last December.

Most are from Sinovac, where over 17 million doses have arrived, and to a lesser extent from Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca, which only affects women over 55 and men over 18. . The country has also cleared the use of CanSino, which it will start receiving batches before June and has signed commercial agreements with Janssen, of Johnson & Johnson, a vaccine that has yet to receive approval from pharmacological authorities in the United States. country.

Regarding the English vaccine, the authorities announced on Saturday that the administration time between the two doses in men under 45 years old will be reduced to only 28 days, instead of 12 weeks, the usual time.

In the past 24 hours, the national positivity rate – the number of infections per 100 PCR tests – was 9% after performing more than 65,000 tests, while in the metropolitan area, which is home to the capital, it was by 12%.

With information from EFE

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