CORONAVIRUS PANAMA
Panama City, May 31 (EFE) .- The Ministry of Health of Panama (Minsa) reported this Monday of 321 new cases of covid-19 and one death from the disease, making a total of 378,097 confirmed infections and 6,371 deaths in more than a year of pandemic.
The Minsa report reported that there are 368 hospitalized for the coronavirus in the general ward and 53 in the Intensive Care Units (ICU), while 5,565 are isolated at home with mild symptoms and 341 in hotels.
The recovered patients add up to 365,399 since March 9, 2020, when the first case of contagion occurred in Panama, which has a fatality rate due to covid of 1.7%, one of the lowest in Latin America, according to the Minsa.
Deaths according to age range are concentrated among people aged 60 to 79 years (3,077) and over 80 (1,708), although they have a lower number of cases than the segment of 20 to 59 years.
On this day, 5,836 diagnostic tests for SARS-CoV-2 were applied, with a positivity of 5.5%. In Panama, 2,655,708 tests have been applied to date, 620,710 per million inhabitants.
Until this Monday there is a cumulative of “106 cases of SARS CoV-2 variants (…) such as that of the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa, India and Californian or that from the United States,” said Minsa.
In relation to the national vaccination process, the Ministry of Health pointed out that since last January 20, when the first batch of vaccines against covid-19 arrived in the country, a total of 1,071,998 doses have been administered.
The Minister of Health, Luis Francisco Sucre, said this Sunday that Panama, with 4.2 million inhabitants, already has 14% of its population vaccinated against covid-19 after applying more than one million doses.
Sucre, however, warned that despite the fact that the national immunization plan is advancing, one should not “lower the guard”, since herd immunity is still “far away.”
Panama has received more than 1.4 million doses of the preparations from Pfizer, its largest supplier, and from AstraZeneca.
With the doses of the American manufacturer Pfizer, priority groups are being vaccinated, as established by an official four-phase schedule approved by the health authorities.
Whereas the AstraZeneca preparation is administered to men over 30 years old and women over 50 years old who have signed up to a voluntary registry.
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