Virus slams Cuba as it races to roll out vaccines
THE COVID-19 pandemic is slamming Cuba like never before, even as the country races to roll out its home-grown vaccines – the only locally-developed shots being widely used in Latin America.
The island had seen far fewer infections that most other Latin American nations over t he first year or so of the disease, imposing strict quarantines, isolating the infected and shutting down its tourism industry despite devastating economic consequences.
But new cases have been soaring in recent weeks, with an average of about 6,000 a day being reported in the country of 11 million people. The first three weeks of July have accounted for about 100,000 of the nearly 300,000 infections recorded altogether in Cuba since the first case arrived some 16 months ago.
Cuba’s national director of epidemiology, Francisco Durán, said Tuesday that 717 people have died so far this month in Cuba – a heavy share of the 2,019 who have died in all.
Anxiety over that spread was one of the factors that fed into the wave of street protests that broke out across the country on July 11.
Durán said transmission is “very elevated” now, especially in the central provinces of Matanzas, Cienfuegos and Ciego de Avila, as well as in Guantanamo, to the east. There’s also been a rise in Havana, the capital.
“Of course we are worried, because we see there is a high incidence in the population, above all in young children,” said Yurizam Martínez, a 53-year-old nurse in Havana. “I feel affected psychologically because we have been working for more than a year and we still don’t see the result we had hoped for. ... But we have to keep on.”