Covid-19 breaks records in America as Covax arrives in Chile and Mexico

After more than a year of sustained mourning, America continues to add thousands of daily deaths from covid-19: this week with records in Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela O Peru. Meanwhile, the continent celebrates each new shipment of vaccines, now with the arrival this Friday for the first time of the doses of the mechanism Covax a Chile Y Mexico.

This was a black week in which the number of deceased -numbers after which there are people and families in mourning- and was more evident in Peru, where every 5 minutes a person dies from the disease.

Globally, the cases accumulated they exceed 144 million, while the deceased are 3.07 million worldwide.

America adds up to 1.45 million dead since the start of the pandemic, with the US (570,000), Brazil (386,000) and Mexico (214,000) in the top three positions globally by number of deaths.

Regarding the programs immunization, the world already exceeds 972 million doses of anticovid vaccines administered, being the US the country that has inoculated the most (218 million).

A trail of deaths

Peru, which last year had the rate of deaths highest per 100,000 people in the world, at 98.06, according to the Universidad Johns Hopkins, returns to those days of anxiety with a rate of one death every five minutes and a prolonged second wave fueled by the Brazilian variant, which is accelerating the contagions.

The same situation faces Colombia, with 430 deaths in one day this Thursday, the highest figure since the start of the pandemic and more than 400 deaths in each of the last four days; Venezuela, with the record of 22 people deceased in 24 hours, and Argentina, with a record this Friday of 557 deaths.

In the latter country, the health authorities of the Garrahan Hospital, one of the pediatric referral centers, expressed concern about the increase in hospitalizations of children due to covid.

In Ecuador, the recrudescence of pandemic forced to declare in 16 provinces the return to confinement from tonight, for now on weekends and for a month. The country added 5,913 new infections in the last 24 hours and accumulates 371,306 since there are records, while the deaths are 18,062 in total.

Mexico and Chile receive the first Covax vaccines

This week, the mechanism Covax He was again the target of criticism in the XXVII Ibero-American Summit in Andorra, where many of the Latin American nations, such as Uruguay, criticized it, and others, such as Peru, Honduras and Panama, called for concrete actions to supply the region with vaccines more efficiently.

As if the critics would have spurred its distribution, today the first remittances of Covax mechanism, sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO), to Chile and Mexico for the first time. Thus, Chile received a batch of 158,000 vaccines from the Anglo-Swedish laboratory AstraZeneca and Mexico another 1.07 million.

Chile It again registered more than 7,000 new COVID-19 infections today and the positivity rate remains above 10%, despite the fact that it has been with massive quarantines for a month that affect about 90% of the population.

Central America on alert

On the other hand, Central America faces a new wave of covid-19, with a record number of people in Intensive Care Units (ICU) in Costa Rica and a growing number of infections in Guatemala Y Honduras.

These two countries have only immunized a handful of people thanks to the doses they have received from donations, and are awaiting the arrival of lots purchased from the Sputnik V from Russia, of which Honduras received the first 6,000 dose yesterday.

Honduras, with less than 1% of the country vaccinated, is the Central American country with the least immunized in more than a year of the pandemic.

In Brazil, the pandemic stabilizes

On Brazil, the second wave of the pandemic shows signs of stabilizing. The pressure on intensive care units has dropped slightly, although it continues at “very high” levels in much of its territory, according to a report released today by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz).

“Deaths from covid-19 fell 23.6% in this last week. It is the first” time in two months that “we have registered a joint drop in new cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Long live life!” social networks the governor of Sao Paulo, Joao Doria.

CDC Recommends Retaking J&J Vaccine
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On USA, an advisory committee from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) advised resuming the application of the vaccine from Janssen, a Belgian subsidiary of Johnson&Johnson (J&J), after it was practically suspended ten days ago for several cases of thrombosis in women.

Next, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the green light to resume use of Janssen’s vaccine.

And in CanadaOn the other hand, flights from India and Pakistan were banned this Thursday for 30 days due to the rapid increase in infections in those countries and the detection in Canadian territory of a growing number of cases of the Indian variant B.1.617, known as “double mutant”.

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