The possibilities of a new confinement in Colombia due to covid-19

Given the panorama experienced in some cities in China due to the increase in cases of covid-19 and the return to confinement, there is concern whether strict lockdown could be applied again in Colombia, considering that the virus has left more than 6 million infections and 139,000 dead due to the disease.

According to information from the Ministry of Health, it was noted that this Saturday, April 16, four Colombians died from the disease on the last day, a figure that occurred on March 25, 2020.

Despite the situation in China, the epidemiologist Carlos Saavedra ruled out this possibility for Colombia. “The countries that are at high risk of infection are New Zealand and Australia, because like China, they implemented strict confinement, in which there was no significant circulation of the virus, but relied on vaccines,” said the also professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the National University.

Two years after the start of the pandemic, Saavedra explained that fear of the virus is still very strong in these countries. “There is still panic about the presence of infection and that is why the drastic measures we are seeing are taken, such as killing pets and establishing strict confinement, which are really no longer justified at this time because the virus is in a stage of migration from pandemic to endemic,” he said.

It may interest you: This Saturday, April 16, Colombia registered 159 new cases of covid-19

The doctor says, “Colombia may have stable recirculation processes and small seasonal climate-related peaks and there will be peaks of infection again, but severe forms will be rare and rare, because a high percentage of the population is vaccinated and has already suffered from the disease.”

For his part, the doctor Jorge Alberto Cortés Luna, a specialist in Internal Medicine, infectiologist and professor at the National University, says that “in China there are 1.4 billion people, of whom probably one million have had covid-19.”

The doctor also stated that in the Asian country, “the problem can be summed up in that its population is very large and since human-to-human transmission cannot be controlled, there would still be a chance that hundreds and hundreds of people will die if the country is not closed as it is doing.”

The two specialists agree that all the variants that are being presented in the world will reach the country, but at the moment, all over the planet, there is a high capacity to respond to the virus.

The most recent report from the Ministry of Health also points out that as of Saturday, April 16, 2022, a total of 81,956,379 doses of the vaccine against covid-19 had already been applied in Colombia.

According to the same report, the number of Colombians with the complete vaccination schedule, that is, those who have already received the two doses of the biological, currently amounts to 28,784,074 people, while 6,395,050 people have been immunized with single doses. Similarly, 11,023,334 booster doses have been applied.

By aggregating all the figures, Colombia reached a total of 6,089,540 infections, of which 3,273 are active cases and 5,922,819 correspond to positive cases that have already managed to overcome the disease. During the last day, a total of 9,814 vaccines were applied, of which 2,323 were for the second injection, while another 484 were single-dose.

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