Chile rules out opening borders with Argentina in September

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Chilean health authorities ruled out Thursday that the borders with Argentina will be opened in September and denied that there is a tentative date to allow entry to non-residents.

“We have not studied any such announcement. This decision by Argentina is unilateral. We have not yet had official conversations with this country,” affirmed the Minister of Health, Enrique Paris.

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The clarification came three days after Argentina’s migratory authorities informed us that they are evaluating the implementation of a pilot plan to enable land border crossings with Chile and Uruguay as of September 6.

“In the case that a person in Argentina wants to enter Chile has to comply with all the requirements,” he added.

Chile closed its borders to tourists in April, when it was going through a second wave of the pandemic that put the health system on the ropes and forced it to shield the entry to the country to all types of people except in emergency cases.

Since July 26, nationals and foreign residents who have a vaccination card, i.e., who have completed their vaccination schedule 14 days ago or more, are allowed to enter the country, but the entry of tourists is still forbidden.

“We must prevent the entry of strains that are more aggressive and cause changes in the management of our pandemic,” added Paris.

Chile has been going through its best epidemiological moment for a few weeks now: the pandemic has receded to levels not seen since April 2020, and the positivity rate (number of positive results per 100 tests performed) has been below 2% for more than ten days.

However, experts are cautiously awaiting the arrival of the delta variant, the most contagious according to the World Health Organization, of which around 80 cases have already been confirmed.

In the last 24 hours, 1,128 new cases and 86 deaths have been added, bringing the number of infected people to 1.62 million and more than 36,243 deaths.

The improvement occurs in parallel to one of the most successful immunization campaigns globally, reaching more than 82% of the target population with two doses and almost 89% with one injection, mostly from Coronavac, but also Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and CanSino.

Last Wednesday, the country started inoculating third doses in those over 55 years of age who have already completed their vaccination with Coronavac. More than 65,000 people received an additional dose.