Chile began 2021 with a sharp rise in coronavirus infections, more than half of the 6,938 it registered in the middle of last year, when it reached its maximum number of infected since the arrival of the pandemic.
The country began the year with 3,588 infected, more than half of the almost 7,000 it registered in June last year, when it reached the highest number of infected since the start of the pandemic, the Ministry of Health reported on Friday.
The South American country registers for the second consecutive day more than 3,500 new cases. The last day of 2020 reported 3,522 infected.
The number of new cases was detected just three days before Chileans can apply for a special permit to go on vacation to any part of the country – except for a few communes that are under total quarantine – between the beginning of January and the end of March , and when the close contacts of a Chilean woman who brought the new variant of the coronavirus detected in England to the country is monitored.
In the first half of 2020, Chile was among the countries with the most infections in the region and in recent months it had registered a plateau of about 1,400 new cases per day, a figure that began to rise in the last month, reaching an average of 2,000 infected per day.
The South American country began on Christmas Eve the vaccination of health personnel working in critical patient units, with the first 10,000 doses of the vaccine from the Pfizer laboratory. The process will resume next Monday with the second batch of antivirus that arrived the day before.
The government of President Sebastián Piñera says that the first quarter of this year will have some five million people vaccinated, who are among the people most at risk of becoming infected. By the end of the first semester, the goal is to have 15 million of the 19 million Chileans vaccinated.
Chile has 612,000 infected and 16,660 deaths.
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