HAVANA, Cuba, Aug 3 (ACN) Cuba must continue to seek alternatives so as not to be defeated by the pandemic; we have to defeat it and we have to do it in the shortest possible time, said Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel.
At Monday’s meeting of the Temporary Working Group for the prevention and control of COVID-19, Diaz-Canel emphasized that we must face the epidemic together and that together we will know how to overcome the current complex situation, caused by the wide and rapid worldwide expansion of the Delta strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
For this purpose,” he recalled, “we have the knowledge of science, of our scientists, as has been more than demonstrated, and we also have,” he added later, “the work of health workers. However, he also added, we need the responsibility of the population and the solidarity that these times demand.
The President’s reflections were related to the analysis of the situation of medicines for the care of patients with COVID-19, the availability of oxygen and other supplies, and the actions to guarantee the indispensable resources to continue saving lives and contributing to the recovery of the sick.
At the meeting, attended by ministers and Public Health specialists, the governor of Pinar del Río, Rubén Ramos Moreno, reported on the increase in the rate of active cases in the last week and the actions to counteract it.
His colleague in Artemisa, Ricardo Concepción Rodríguez, enunciated the measures adopted in his territory in the face of a possible scenario where the number of positive patients increases due to the Delta strain.
Reinaldo García Zapata, the highest government authority in Havana, commented on the situation of the epidemic here. The capital -he said- has the capacity to stop the growth of cases, which includes reinforcing the control of movement with community factors; we have to do this well to contribute to the reduction of the number of patients, he said.
The governor of Matanzas, Mario Sabines Lorenzo, praised the decreasing trend of active and new cases in his jurisdiction, at a rate of minus 30 percent in the last two weeks.
From Villa Clara, the chief provincial executive, Alberto López Díaz, referred to the growth of home admissions and the increase in the number of beds in institutions for complex cases, which -he emphasized- will allow for a better situation for the care of serious and high-risk patients.
All the provincial authorities and the mayor of the Isle of Youth reported on the confrontation and control of the epidemic in their territories in a meeting where Dr. Francisco Durán García, national director of Epidemiology of the Ministry of Public Health, analyzed the behavior of the pandemic in Cuba in week 30 of 2021, which ended this July 31.
He recalled that the average number of cases per day at the end of the week was 283 percent higher than at the end of June, an increase produced by the increase in autochthonous and imported cases, with a rise of 290.7 percent and 10.5 percent, respectively.
He stressed that the highest levels of transmission in July were in Matanzas, Havana, Ciego de Avila, Santiago de Cuba, Cienfuegos, Guantánamo, Villa Clara, Camagüey and Holguín, which accounted for 83.1 percent of the cases diagnosed in the country during the seventh month of the year.
In July -he added- 198,838 autochthonous cases and 1,560 imported cases were diagnosed. He also informed that the accumulated lethality up to the end of week 30 was 0.72 percent, although in July it was 0.77 percent.
As of August 1, Dr. Duran Garcia explained, 190 countries have reported cases of COVID-19, the number of confirmed cases is 198 million 963,267 and the lethality rate is 2.13 percent. In the Americas, 78 million 200,057 confirmed cases have been reported – 39.3 percent of the cases reported in the world – and 2 million 031,886 deaths, for a lethality rate of 2.60 percent.