translated from Spanish: Covid Biobío Social Table calls for greater decentralization in the decisions of the pandemic

A greater knowledge of the territory and a large installed capacity in terms of knowledge and innovation. These attributes are what the Covid Biobío Social Table wants to make available to the fight against the pandemic, through a greater decentralization of the decisions taken by the Executive on the subject. 
This is what the group expressed in a letter sent to the President of the Republic, Sebastián Piñera, in which they request autonomy and resources so that the different actors of the Biobío Region can take charge of the health situation and its territorial edges.
From the Casa del Arte of the University of Concepción, the group released the letter, signed by all its representatives. The idea is that this proposal materializes in a pilot plan, which if it gives positive results, can be replicated throughout the country, considering each of the realities of the national territory.
The letter highlights all those strengths that the region has in this area. For example, having been a pioneer in the manufacture of mechanical ventilators or having been part of the validation of a exhaled air test, which allows a rapid and effective detection of Covid-19, in addition to the monitoring of wastewater in different communes of the region, which allows to anticipate at least two weeks the behavior of the virus , among many others. 
In this regard, the rector of the University of Concepción, Carlos Saavedra Rubilar, said that “it is requested to give greater powers to the regional authorities, which in coordination with the governorates, municipalities, in addition to all the organizational levels of the citizenry, can contribute to the decision-making that guarantee greater care of the person.”
In the same vein, the mayor of Concepción, Álvaro Ortiz Vera, said that “if we are not able to believe in human capital, in the experience we have been gaining from March 2020 to date in how to manage this pandemic, if that possibility is not given to the territories, we can hardly move forward.” The community leader said that he thinks it is unusual to have to wait every day for the press point to know if the communes of Biobío are going to have any variation in terms of quarantines.
For his part, the president of the Medical College of Concepción, German Acuña Game, said that, rightly, not decentralizing means deaths. “We are tired of people dying in our wards; the staff is busted. Do you think it doesn’t hurt to see a person die and know that there are culprits of this because they didn’t want to decentralize decision-making?” questioned Dr. Acuña.
With regard to the entry of new variants and their sequencing, the specialist recognized the imperative need to have a sequencer to do testsmassive, in order that the most complex patients do not have to be sent to Santiago to be sequenced.
Acuña said that “we need to know how much delta we have, because if we have a lot, we will have to strengthen all the risk communication, all the control measures. We must be sure that it can be decided here,” he said.
Regarding the content of the letter, Carol Cid Cid, vice president of the National Federation of Associations of Nurses of Chile, said that “this is raising our voices, rightly asking for an end to centralism. We need to have the territorial management to be able to develop this strategy that we have been proposing as a Covid Biobío Social Table”.
For his part, Macarena Cepeda Godoy, president of the Association of Fishing Industrialists (Asipes), highlighted the fact that “the Biobío Region has capabilities that are probably unique at the national level, therefore, we believe it is important to recognize these territorial realities. Here, the productive sector has a high level of vaccination: in the fishing-industrial sector we have more than 80% of the workers vaccinated. Therefore, recognizing this type of reality is very important to be able to work together with the territorial authorities,” he said.

Original source in Spanish

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