Coronavirus wave pushes Cuba’s healthcare system to the brink

HAVANA, Aug. 11 (Reuters) – Cuba brings back hundreds of doctors working overseas and converts hotels into isolation centers and hospitals to fight a COVID-19 crisis that is overwhelming health services and mortuary in parts of the Caribbean island.

The country, which has managed to contain infections for most of the past year, now faces one of the world’s worst epidemics, fueled by the spread of the most infectious Delta variant, even as she rushes to vaccinate her population.

The seven-day moving average of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Cuba has increased eightfold in two months to 5,639 per million population, ten times the global average.

One in five tests is positive, four times the benchmark positivity rate of 5% cited by the World Health Organization. The seven-day average of confirmed deaths from COVID-19 is around 52 per million population, six times the global average, although the actual number may be much higher, representing potentially undiagnosed cases .

The COVID-19 outbreak came amid Cuba’s worst economic crisis in decades, which had already resulted in drug shortages and long queues for scarce commodities, making it difficult to implementation of blockages.

The situation has come as a shock to some in the communist-ruled country where the right to public health care is considered sacrosanct.

“I saw queues of more than 20 hours, people dying in the corridors (of the polyclinic),” wrote Ana Iris Diaz, professor at the University of the central Cuban city of Santa Clara and self-proclaimed “Revolutionary”, in a Facebook post that went viral this week.

“I saw an elderly woman die after several hours of waiting and four days without an antigen test or PCR. Simply put, I saw what I wish I had never seen: the collapse of our health care system.

Cuba’s communist government did not respond to a request for comment. He denounced the tougher sanctions in the United States, saying it had also slowed the deployment of its vaccines due to the difficulty of acquiring inputs. Critics blame Cuba’s inefficient state economy more.

“We are at the limit of our capacity for infrastructure, resources, medicine and oxygen,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on Monday at a government meeting on COVID-19.

THE INCINERATOR BREAKS UNDER POWER

Cuba was a COVID-19 success story last year, successfully containing the outbreak, sending doctors all over the world to help and even developing its own vaccines, which it has started applying in recent months.

Deaths in Cuba since the start of the pandemic are still only half the global average, according to official data.

The death toll is rising rapidly, however.

In the eastern province of Guantanamo, artist Daniel Ross said that a 30-year-old friend of his who caught COVID-19 recently died due to a lack of medicine and oxygen.

“Here we are fighting COVID-19 with Azitromicina, which usually costs 16 pesos in pharmacies, but they haven’t had any for months,” he said, adding that the cost had climbed to 3,600 pesos , or the equivalent of $ 150 on the black market.

Also infected and having trouble breathing, he said he takes inhalations with yagruma leaves but sometimes cannot even heat the water due to the power outages which have become more frequent in recent times. .

Ihosvany Fernandez, director of communal services in Guantanamo province, told local television that the total number of deaths there from all causes jumped earlier this month to more than 60 per day from around 12 on average usually.

Official data does not show more than 10 COVID-19 deaths per day at Guantanamo for these days, suggesting an underreporting of deaths from the respiratory disease.

One of the province’s incinerators had broken down due to overuse, Fernandez said.

So far, a quarter of Cuba’s 11.2 million people have been vaccinated with its two most advanced vaccines, which officials say have been shown to be over 90% effective in phase three trials.

On a positive note, the case fatality rate in Havana, where nearly two-thirds of the population have now been fully immunized, was only 0.69% compared to 0.93% for the rest of the country during the first week of August, according to an official. data, suggesting that the shots are working.

Reporting by Sarah Marsh in Havana Additional reporting by Nelson Acosta in Havana Editing by Alistair Bell

Our Standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.