Argentina fears second wave of Covid could turn into a tsunami

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – With Monday’s 316 victims, some 60,000 people have died from Covid. Approximately 2.8 million positive cases have been reported. The threat of a tsunami is knocking on the doors of hospitals on the brink of collapse. The fight against the virus has become the very battleground between the Peronist government and the opposition.

Since last Friday there has been a ban on public traffic between 8 PM and 6 AM. Social, recreational, sports and religious activities in closed places have also been suspended. President Alberto Fernández ordered by decree the closure of educational establishments for 2 weeks, but the city of Buenos Aires, administered by the right-wing, defied this measure and opened schools.

A Buenos Aires court upheld the decree. A federal judge immediately overturned that ruling. Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta decided not to abide by the ruling while waiting for the Supreme Court to uphold it. For the time being, Larreta has the support of part of the middle and upper classes who, with their pots and pans, returned on Monday to protest the restrictions.

“Compliance (with the restrictions) is very high, the vast majority of people perceive the dimension of the problem,” reacted Fernández. The discussion about the in-person nature of classes is just one more chapter of a long discord. The city considers that the contagion rate in schools reaches 1% and that, with the new measures, the right to education is affected. The national government insists that the problem goes beyond the opening of those schools where only 14% of the capital’s teachers have been vaccinated: it is a question of reducing the movement in the streets by 35%, they insist.

The PRO, party of former President Mauricio Macri, has called for demonstrations in the streets against the closing of schools. They rely on the sympathy of influential media. For the newspaper La Nación, the government is “deaf” to “the demands of a middle class with aspirations.”

From Peronism it is recalled that Larreta has not only reduced the education budget during the last years. He has also accused teachers of “indoctrinating” children. Close to Fernández it is feared that the most angry sectors of Macrism, which months ago accused the Government of “poisoning” the population with the Russian vaccine Spuntnik V, are now trying to generate a health crisis that will eat away at the last political capital of the President of an economically ruined country.

Electoral background

Peronism is betting its chances of winning the October parliamentary elections on a massive vaccination. The authorities estimate that 10 million people will be immunized in the first week of May, almost 25% of the population. Vaccination rates could be accelerated. Richmond, an Argentine laboratory, announced that it is in a position to produce its first million doses of the Sputnik V. Argentina will be the first Latin American country to manufacture Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute’s product.

However, the elections are still far away on the horizon. The nearest danger is an exponential increase in contagions. “Journalists and politicians who call for resisting the measures are real criminals. If the system collapses, we must be prepared to experience Brazil’s situation”, warned Arnaldo Dubin, head of Intensive Care at a major hospital in the capital.

Other disputes

The pandemic issue is only one of the chapters of a bigger fight. Some of the 10,000 people affected by a single tax on wealth, which seeks to strengthen the capacity of the State amidst the crisis, have lodged appeals in the courts to avoid paying it.

The discussion on the opening of schools relegated to an irrelevant level an issue which, under other conditions, would have generated a strong political impact. A commission of the two chambers of Congress has concluded that during the Macri Administration the power of the State was used to implement a systematic plan of illegal espionage.

A total of 354 individuals and 71 organizations and political parties were targeted by these procedures conducted “with premeditation and malice aforethought.”

Source: El Periodico