Chiloé (Chile) (AFP)
After traveling long distances on dirt roads, crossing rivers on foot, advancing in the rain and mud to reach the most remote parts of the country, health personnel are steadily extending anticovid vaccination in Chile, even to remote territories of the archipelago from Chiloé, more than 1,200 km south of Santiago.
At a time when vaccination reaches 70% of the target population with at least one dose, toilets travel the fjords of the archipelago – famous for its colorful stilt houses (houses on the water) and its wooden churches – exposed to the inclement Pacific Ocean and low temperatures to bring vaccines to those who need them.
“We cross rivers with vaccines to get to those places. We do it once a month with or without rain, with or without sun. We have to go yes or yes,” Yolanda Álvarez, 30, told AFP. a nurse who travels the more than 30 islands that make up the Chiloé archipelago, where the coronavirus has also arrived.
Time is short. Only one month remains until the limit set to vaccinate 80% of Chile’s target population (15.2 million out of a total of 19 million inhabitants of the country) is met.
Chile is one of the countries in the world that is vaccinating its population the fastest against covid-19.
So far, it has applied at least one dose to 10.5 million people, equivalent to 70% of the target population. While 7.9 million have already received the second dose, which yields a coverage percentage of 52.5% of the target population, which includes all those over 16 years of age.
However, the contagion figures do not yield. Last Friday the second highest number of daily infections was registered: 8,680 new cases, something that experts attribute to the high mobility of people and the false sense of security that the vaccine provides.
– The long road to vaccines –
Chile early signed agreements for the purchase of vaccines, mainly from the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, with which it has vaccinated 80% of the population, and from Pfizer / BioNTech.
Immunization shipments arrive in Santiago on international flights. So far, 21.7 million doses have arrived in the country.
Those destined for Chiloé continue their journey from the capital on another plane to Castro, the largest city in the archipelago. From there, they travel by car to the center of the Isla Grande de Chiloé and then, by another stretch of road to the town of Huillinco, where Álvarez receives them and loads them in his fridge to embark on the adventure.
Among all his trips, the most remote he remembers is when he came to vaccinate a person in the Cole Cole area, a beach with very difficult access. From Castro, the regional capital of Chiloé, you have to travel a route for about two hours and then walk several kilometers to reach the place.
In the fjords facing the Pacific, at the top of a mountain without access by vehicle, after kilometers of driving, you only have to walk for hours through the mountains.
“To get there walking we take four or five hours carrying the vaccines and all the medical equipment. They are pure hills (…) we have patients there, one of them is tetraplegic,” says this nurse born in Chiloé, who already has vaccinated about 1,000 patients in the area.
– “An adventure” –
In the northern part of Isla Grande de Chiloé, near the city of Ancud, the closest to the continent, Ximena Ampuero, a 48-year-old senior nursing technician, works in conditions similar to those of Álvarez.
Every day, he tells AFP, he leaves with his team early from a fishing cove called Quetalmahue with doses of the Sinovac vaccine, the only one used in rural and remote areas due to its ease of conservation.
It vaccinates about 10 people daily and the elderly are the “priority,” he says.
“It is an adventure. On a good day, without rain, without mud, we can make 10 visits. But on rainy days and with the current climate we are lucky to do three,” says Ampuero.
Born in that extreme area of Chile and “passionate” about her work, she indicates that adversities are forgotten when they arrive at a remote house and an old man opens the door with a smile.
“They invite you to drink mate, a coffee, to stay a while on the stove to warm up. Here there is a spontaneity and naturalness typical of people who respond to the Chiloe idiosyncrasy”, says Ampuero.
© 2021 AFP
–
