The Minister of Health, Victor Zamora, affirmed that his country would have faced “a massacre” if the Executive did not order a national quarantine in mid-March to confront the onslaught of the COVID-19.
“This quarantine has allowed us to save 145,000 lives and (avoid) more than a million people hospitalized. We could not have received that blow. It would have been a real massacre without the quarantine,” Zamora told the newspaper. The Republic.
The minister added that these figures of the impact that the disease would have had in his country, which is currently the sixth in the world with the most cases of COVID-19, “are conservative projections.”
COMPARISON WITH SPAIN
The minister Victor Zamora He said that the situation in Peru, which currently has more than 9,000 deaths from the epidemic, should not be compared to countries that “have other realities”, since its health system had little more than 100 intensive care beds at the beginning of the disease.
“Spain, which is 1.5 times larger than Peru in population, had 9,000 ICU beds when they started their epidemic. We? 100,” he remarked before saying that 1,400 of those beds already exist and in the coming days Another batch of hundreds of mechanical fans purchased abroad will be installed.
Victor Zamora He reported that there are also 464 ICU beds that so far “have not been used because they are in dispute or arbitration because the contractor did not finish, because they do not deliver the work.”
DESCENT IN DESCENT
The minister assured that Peru is no longer “on a plateau”, but “in a frank decline” of the disease, since currently the average number of infections in the country has dropped to 0.7 people per infected person.
After remarking with these figures he is not being “very optimistic”, but “realistic”, he admitted that there may be an increase in cases once the total quarantine ends and almost all economic activities are restarted, from next July 1.
“We are aware that the moment people leave they will have a higher level of exposure,” he said.
(With information from EFE)
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