Surge in virus infections adds to Puerto Rico’s ongoing woes
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rico seemed to be sprinting toward herd immunity this spring before people began letting their guard down against COVID-19 and new variants started spreading across the U.S. territory.
Now, a spike in cases and hospitalizations has put medical experts at odds with the government, which is struggling to protect people’s health while also trying to prevent an economic implosion on an island battered by hurricanes, earthquakes and a prolonged financial crisis.
“The difficulty here is how do you find a Solomonic decision ... to give people the opportunity to work and be responsible and also maintain health as a priority,” said Ramon Leal, former president of Puerto Rico’s Restaurant Association.
It’s a delicate balance for an island that imposed a lockdown and mask mandates ahead of any U.S. state and has some of the strictest entry requirements of any American jurisdiction — measures that helped contain infections before the latest surge.
Overall, the island of 3.3 million people has reported more than 115,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, over 115,000 suspected ones and more than 2,000 deaths, with transmission rates inching up the last week of April to 28 cases per 100,000 people a day, compared with 17 per 100,000 on the U.S. mainland.
The pandemic has unleashed the second-biggest economic drop Puerto Rico has seen since recordkeeping began in 1980, according to Jose Caraballo, a Puerto Rico economist. The biggest was caused by Hurricane Maria, which inflicted more than $100
billion in damage in 2017, with nearly 3,000 people dying in its aftermath.
More than 30,000 jobs have been lost because of the COVID-19 outbreak, and at least 1,400 businesses have closed, Caraballo said — this on an island that saw nearly 12% of its population flee in the past decade and whose government is struggling with crushing debt that led it to file for the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2017.
“I’m taken aback by what the people of Puerto Rico have had to endure,” Caraballo said.
Many of those who remain are mourning over lost homes, jobs, businesses or loved ones.
Luis Angel Sanchez has two close friends in the intensive care unit and lost his father and son to COVID-19 in April 2020 less than two weeks apart. Sanchez got vaccinated in mid-March.
Sanchez said people should keep their guard up and exhorted the government to impose stricter sanctions on those
not following COVID-19 measures.
“It’s not over yet,” he said. Gov. Pedro Pierluisi has resisted tighter restrictions, saying that another lockdown would be too extreme and that things will keep improving and the island could achieve herd immunity by August: “The solution is vaccination.”
More than 2 million doses have been administered on the island, with 55% having received at least one shot and 27% two.
While health authorities say they are relieved many are eager to get vaccinated, they note that some people who are not yet fully protected are disregarding restrictions that include a more than yearlong curfew.
Along with that, the presence of at least seven COVID-19 variants on the island are believed to be contributing to more cases.
Another factor, experts say, is a drop in testing from an average of around 7,000 tests a day to 2,000, a trend blamed on people becoming fixated on getting vaccinated.