"We are light years away from effective pandemic control", expressed the health guild
Various specialists and even members of the Advisory Council and the Social Bureau agree that the Representative is wrong in his diagnosis. In both, from the Minsal they took away from the claim that made the country's highest authority in a television interview.
"Chile today obviously is suffering, but we have managed to control the pandemic and have had results that are recognized around the world". Like this, President Sebastián Piñera highlighted, in an interview with T13, the Government's handling of Covid-19. Words that surprised different experts and experts.
While it is cross-recognised that contagions have been able to stabilize, just like in the world, from the guilds of specialists maintain that the coronavirus pandemic is far from being controlled. Even when, after five months, Chile managed to get down from a thousand cases a day, registering 922 new infections in the last day.
Since the Chilean Society of Epidemiology (Sochepi), its president, Dr. María Paz Bertoglia, said that "unfortunately in Chile as in many parts of the world this pandemic is not controlled". The master's degree in Epidemiology and Biostatistics pointed out that "in our country we are at a high endemic level since July where between 1,400 and 1,700 daily cases have remained on average weekly and that does not reflect a control".
Bertoglia warned that today there is a "need to prepare for what is coming because we are seeing that cases are resurgent in Europe and are already having problems with critical unit collapses. In that line he affirmed that we must "maintain a well-designed risk communication" and "communicate the real risks" to the population..
Similar analysis is done from the Medical College. Dr. José Miguel Bernucci, national secretary of the guild, he said that "the president's statements are understood as bad information, probably referring to what happened in the Metropolitan Region, where we actually have a significant drop in cases, we have a significant drop in positivity in the tests."
However, Bernucci points out that if "we compare this to other parts of the country, such as Los Ríos, The Lakes, even what still happened in Magellan, the truth is that we are quite a few light years away from effective control of the pandemic.". Internal Medicine specialist emphasized that "I wish the President could clarify these sayings".
Who also expressed his reservations was Dr. Darwin Acuña. The vice president of the Chilean Society of Intensive Care Medicine (Sochimi) stressed that "Chile has a situation of stability with low index, with low positivity, with few cases and persistent mortality".
However, the technical head of the Intensive Care Unit of the Mutual Security remarked that we can not talk about control "considering what has happened for example with Magallanes that are situations where there has been an important resurgence that can occur in any region and where problems are still clearly seen in the management".
Advisory Council: "You have to work on prevention"
On the Advisory Council, what President Piñera expressed was also surprised and concerned. Dr. María Teresa Valenzuela – categorically – indicated that "the pandemic is not controlled". He added that the Covid "has had a long period in which we are with a stable number of cases. However, not that this is even for the whole country".
The Master in Public Health of the University of Chile also expressed concern about "the agglomerations that have occurred during these last weeks" and pointed out that "the message we have to maintain is self-care" and "work hard and permanently on prevention".
In that same line, Dr. Catterina Ferreccio, also a member of the Advisory Council, expressed his surprise, although he chose to give an interpretation to the President's words: "Probably what he meant is that right now we are in a relatively stable situation at the national level., even though there are still outbreaks".
Of course, the epidemiologist at the Catholic University is very clear in pointing out that, despite this stability, "we all know it doesn't mean the epidemic is under control". In addition, the expert realizes that there is a very important indicator that relates to when each case infects another case.
In this sense, Ferreccio stated that "we are still with a transmission rate above what we might have in a moment of control, right now a case we report infects another and has to be under one, so nationally we are still with a high transmission rate.".
On the other hand, former Health Minister Álvaro Erazo, also part of this team, directly employed President Piñera: "What I'd like to ask you is where you got that information from.". Erazo raised that "what we all deserve is an explanation of what the technical basis is, Epidemiological, Health, about what has been established as an argument, that's what worries me".
What does the Covid Social Table say?
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Government decided to convene a heterogeneous table with different actors to address the health crisis. Two of the members of the so-called Covid Social Table also expressed their strangeness.
Dr. Carmen Castillo, former health minister, argued that it was an "unlucky phrase" that of President Piñera, adding that "it must be reviewed and clarified by the technical institutions and by the Minsal". He noted that this "has not yet been overcome and we hope that this can be quickly corrected which is not exactly what is happening in our country".
From another glance, the mayor of La Granja, Philip Delpin, president of the Chilean Association of Municipalities (Achm) and representative of mayors on the Social Bureau, commented that "at no point can we say that the pandemic is controlled". The professor in chemistry, University of Talca added that "the virus is present, the virus is still being distributed in populations".
The communal chief asked to be very "realistic" in this matter and called for "not launching false news because people trust each other and in trust is the danger".
From the Minsal they take distance
Consulted by ADN, undersecretary of Healthcare Networks, Arturo Zúñiga, replied that "right now we have a very low number of cases and we have to keep going like this, but obviously we have to be very alert and not lower our arms, because it is happening in other countries of Europe can be repeated here in our country and we already have an example in the Magallanes region".
Zúñiga did highlight that he is "doing a job that has accounted for good results, we've already seen it with the 'Fondéate at your house', we saw it with the decline in contagions. We have to remember that three months ago we had six thousand cases a day, we had a plebiscite in which all the people could see that the access to vote was quite fast and in that sense we have to continue to show about this new way of living., to maintain this level of contagion and not have an increase without having to rule out that there may be".