Health alert in Cuba after recording record number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in one day

Cuba recorded this Thursday two new absolute daily records since the start of the pandemic: that of COVID-19 cases with 3,819 and that of deaths with 26, including a two-month-old baby, reported the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap).

The previous maximum number of infections reported in a day had occurred the day before with 3,664. That of Monday’s deaths, with 21.

Today’s figures show complex epidemiological picture in the Caribbean country, which has accumulated 218,376 infections and 1,431 deaths since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

The most difficult situation is in the western province of Matanzas which concentrated this Thursday the largest number of patients of the day with 1,327, the first time that a territory has exceeded one thousand SARS-Cov-2 positives.

In this region, on the brink of health collapse and with an incidence of more than 1,300 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, Patients are piling up in hospital hallways and drugs are running out, a situation many people have reported on social media.

Several people have spontaneously organized on Twitter and Facebook to raise money and send masks, hand sanitizer and other supplies as part of efforts to alleviate the health situation.

Miguel Díaz-Canel’s regime also sent additional medical staff to this province, which is home to the tourist resort of Varadero.

Havana and the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba followed Matanzas today with 645 and 387 cases, respectively. In Cuban laboratories, 39,101 samples were processed to detect current cases, of which 44 were imported.

In hospitals and isolation centers they are admitted 44,970 people: 21,091 active cases -72 critical and 101 serious-, 15,301 with suspicious symptoms and the rest under epidemiological surveillance.

In high-risk territories, including capital, a health intervention study with Abdala and Soberana 02, the two most advanced vaccines against the coronavirus of the five that Cuba is developing.

Both vaccines wait emergency use authorization from the Cuban drug regulatory body after showing an efficacy of 92.2% (Abdala) and 62% (Soberana 02) in the last phase of clinical trials, according to local health authorities.

More than a million of the 11.2 million Cubans received the full directive of these formulas in the context of clinical trials and intervention studies developed in parallel with that of health.

Cuba does not integrate the WHO Covax mechanism created for low and middle income countries to access vaccinesIt did not buy them on the international market either.

(With information from EFE)

Read on: