“You don’t have masks and you shouldn’t be here!” The order was issued by the major Jofre Diaz, commander of the Castilla police station, and the echo produced by the sound coming from behind his mask, took three men who were talking next to a barn, on the commercial boulevard of La 68, out of the morning loach.
“I’m leaving for the house!” Replied the aforementioned, as the meeting dissolved.
In this sector of the Castilla neighborhood, in the northwest of Medellín, the patrols developed an intense activity to remind citizens that mobility is restricted, due to a new “quarantine for life” decreed by the Antioquia Government, and the alert orange that governs the department, due to the high occupancy rate of the hospital network.
Martha Cano, 42, said that he dared to leave his house to make an urgent money transfer through a branch in Gana, but when he arrived at the establishment, the police were already sending him to close. A caretaker and two female employees stood idly by, lowering the folding metal door.
“This is horrible, you can’t do anything anymore,” Martha complained, commenting on the controls that will apply until midnight on Monday, July 20, in the middle of the upward curve of covid-19 infections.
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EL COLOMBIANO toured several sectors of the Aburrá Valley yesterday morning, confirming that the majority of citizens abided by the restrictions on movement. In the main roads there was a low flow of traffic, which allowed an agile movement through arteries such as the Caldas variant; the Regional, South and North motorways; 80, Oriental and San Juan avenues; and 30th street, among others.
This ease of getting around without the usual “bluffs” meant that there was also a low frequency in the public transport service. At the bus stop on the route to Caldas, in Plaza de la Luz (downtown Medellín), the dispatcher Victor Estrada, 55, said that she was receiving a bus every 20 minutes, when she usually did it every five minutes.
Through social networks, the displeasure of several users in the north of the Aburrá Valley was known, because the inter-municipal buses were passing every 40 minutes.
In Bello Park, which was cordoned off several blocks around to restrict vehicular access, from time to time a soul passed in a hurry, as a military patrol and another police patrolled and asked for papers.
Ana Maria Child, 21, crossed her son Emiliano, one year. He justified his departure by saying that he should take him on growth therapy. “Here I have seen that people are separated, but I come from Copacabana and there if I saw many people gathered in the park,” he said.
Although there were some exceptions to the tour, of passers-by who did not wear face masks and sat on the sidewalks to watch life go by, there was generally a positive response to the isolation order. “The decrease in pedestrians was achieved by 95%, vehicular traffic by 85% and accidents by 65%, compared to a normal day. The trade has fulfilled “, he said Leonardo Buitrago, Operative Undersecretary of the Medellin Secretariat of Security.
Between 00:01 am and 4:00 pm yesterday, the Police imposed 606 appearings in the Aburrá Valley, 434 of them in the paisa capital.
In the atrium of the church of the Envigado park, with a fence in between, the parishioner Maria del Socorro Acevedo he knelt down to pray. At the end, he indicated that he was 64 years old and that, despite the restriction, he went for a walk. “I suffer from scoliosis, osteoporosis and arthrosis. I have many medications, but the only thing that calms my pain is walking for a little while. That is why I went out, and to pray, so that in this pandemic God may have mercy on all of us. ”
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