Record in Latin America: Chile approaches 4 million vaccinated

SANTIAGO DE CHILE.- Like today, it is a year of the first coronavirus cases, Chile She holds the Latin American vaccination record, but also a rapid spread of the virus, as at the peak of the pandemic in July 2020. This week the country will reach 4 million people vaccinated and it is expected to meet the goal of inoculating 5 million people by the end of March.

This Wednesday, when Chile remembers the first confirmed case of covid, andhe country is among the top five in the world where the largest percentage of its population (18%) has injected at least one dose, according to an AFP classification based on government data.

And it is the eighth and only Latin American in the classification of doses (one or two) administered per 100 inhabitants, with 18.3 doses.

As of Tuesday, the total vaccinated was 3,529,523, or 23.5% of the target population of 15 million and more than 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.

However, the success of mass vaccination, which places Chile in third place in the world per 100 inhabitants, is marred by the strong spread of the virus, in a second wave in full development.

The Department of Health reported 3,053 new infections in the past 24 hours today, a figure that brought active cases to 23,913. Even more alarming, the positivity of PCR tests, which reached 10.92% , the highest figure since July 26, 2020, at the worst time of the pandemic. The positivity was therefore 11.15%.

Worsened by the end of the holidays and the start of the school year, the authorities issued a decree that obliges the integrated health system, with public hospitals and private clinics, to increase the number of beds for seriously ill patients to 3,216.

It’s the same level of worst time last winter. In reviewing the year of the pandemic, José Miguel Bernucci, national secretary of the faculty of medicine, praised the role of the authorities in increasing the number of critical beds in a few months. “We hope this can be replicated in other areas of health,” he said. He also praised the vaccination program, stating that this achievement rests on two pillars: “the good management of the authorities, from the president (Sebastián Piñera) down with the negotiations with several laboratories to obtain different types of vaccines in a short time and experience of our primary care centers in immunization programs and the experience of health personnel ”.

The main difficulty, according to Bernucci, has been to avoid contagion. “The entire academic and scientific community agrees that the only way to prevent deaths is to avoid contagion,” he said.

“Our country has wasted a lot of time, especially in the first months when the authorities were unwilling to generate infection prevention policies. Also risk communication problems, which have led the community to relax measures during certain periods, increasing infections, ”he said.

“Any assessment should be conducted saying that today we have 27,000 fewer Chileans who have died from preventable causes because they did not know that cutting contagion was the way to deal with the pandemic, as pointed out many experts from the start, ”lamented the doctor.

AFP and ANSA agencies

THE NATION