translated from Spanish: Covid-19 breaks records in America as Covax arrives in Chile and Mexico

This was a black week in which the death number – numbers after which there are grieving individuals and families – skyrocketed and was most evident in Peru, where every 5 minutes a person dies from the disease.
Globally, cumulative cases exceed 144 million, while the deceased are 3.07 million worldwide.
America has totaled 1.45 million dead since the start of the pandemic, with the US (570,000), Brazil (386,000) and Mexico (214,000) in the top three places worldwide by number of death.
In terms of immunization programs, the world already exceeds 972 million doses of anticovid vaccines given, with the U.S. being the most inoculated country (218 million).

Peru, which last year had the highest death rate for every 100,000 people in the world, at 98.06, according to Johns Hopkins University, returns to those days of zozobra with a rate of one deceased every five minutes and a prolonged second wave fueled by the Brazilian variant, which is accelerating contagions.
The same situation faces Colombia, with 430 deaths on a day on Thursday, the highest figure since the start of the pandemic and more than 400 deaths in each of the last four days; Venezuela, with the record of 22 people who died in 24 hours, and Argentina, with a record this Friday of 557 death.
In the latter country, health authorities at Garrahan Hospital, one of the reference pediatric centres, expressed concern about the increase in hospitalizations of children by covid.
In Ecuador, the upsizing of the pandemic forced the return to confinement in 16 provinces from tonight, for now on weekends and for a month. The country has added 5,913 new contagions in the last 24 hours and has accumulated 371,306 since registrations, while the deceased are 18,062 in total.
Mexico, Chile receive first Covax vaccines
This week, the Covax mechanism was again critical of criticism at the XXVII Ibero-American Summit in Andorra, where many of the Latin American nations, such as Uruguay, criticized it, and others, such as Peru, Honduras and Panama, called for concrete actions to fill the vaccine region more efficiently.
As if the criticism had spurred its distribution, today came the first remittances of the Covax mechanism, sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO), to Chile and Mexico for the first time. Thus, Chile received a batch of 158,000 vaccines from the Anglo-Swedish laboratory AstraZeneca and Mexico another 1.07 million.
Chile today re-registered more than 7,000 new covid-19 contagions and the positivity rate remains above 10%, although it has been with mass quarantines affecting about 90% of the population for a month.

On the other hand, Central America faces a new wave of covid-19, with record people in Intensive Care Units (ICU) in Costa Rica and a growing number of contagions in Guatemala and Honduras.
These two countries have barely immunized a handful of people thanks to the doses they have received from donations, and are awaiting the arrival of batches purchased from Russia’s Sputnik V, of which Honduras received the first 6,000 doses yesterday.
Honduras, with less than 1% of the country vaccinated, is the Central American country with the least immunized in more than a year of the pandemic.

In Brazil, the second wave of the pandemic signals stabilizing. Pressure in intensive care units has been slightly reduced, although it continues at “very high” levels in much of its territory, according to a report released today by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz).
“Covid-19 deaths fell by 23.6% in the last week. It is the first” time in two months that “we have recorded a joint drop in new cases, admitted andbited. Live life!” said Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria on his social media.

In the United States, an advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advised to resume the application of the vaccine from Janssen, a Belgian subsidiary of Johnson&Johnson (J&J), after it was virtually suspended ten days ago for several cases of thrombosis in women.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) then gave the green light to the resumption of Janssen vaccine use.
And in Canada, on the other hand, flights from India and Pakistan were banned on Thursday for 30 days in the face of the rapid increase in contagions in those countriesdetection on Canadian territory of a growing number of cases of the Indian variant B.1.617, known as “double mutant”.

Original source in Spanish