Cuba breaks record for Covid-19 infections and deaths in a single day

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Cuba registered on Thursday (8) two new absolute daily records since the beginning of the pandemic: 3,819 cases of Covid-19, and 26 deaths, including a two-month-old baby, informed the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap).

The previous maximum number of infections reported in one day had occurred the day before, with 3,664. The death toll was 21 on Monday.

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Today’s figures show the complex epidemiological panorama in the Caribbean country, which has accumulated 218,376 infections and 1,431 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

The most difficult situation is in the western province of Matanzas, which concentrated today the largest number of sick people of the day with 1,327, the first time that the territory has exceeded 1,000 SARS-Cov-2 positives.

In that region, on the verge of health collapse and with an incidence of more than 1,300 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, patients are accumulating in hospital corridors and there is a shortage of medicine, a situation that many Internet users have denounced on social networks.

Several people have spontaneously organized on Twitter and Facebook to collect money and send masks, disinfectant gel and other supplies, as part of the efforts to alleviate the health situation. The government also sent additional medical personnel to that province, which is home to the tourist resort of Varadero.

Havana and the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba followed Matanzas today with 645 and 387 cases, respectively.

Cuban laboratories processed 39,101 samples to detect today’s cases, of which 44 were imported. In hospitals and isolation centers, 44,970 persons are admitted: 21,091 active cases -72 critical and 101 severe-, 15,301 with suspected symptoms and the rest under epidemiological surveillance.

In the territories at risk, including the capital, a health intervention study is being carried out with Abdala and Soberana 02, the two most advanced preparations against the coronavirus of the five developed by Cuba.

Both formulas are awaiting authorization for emergency use by the Cuban drug regulatory agency after showing 92.2% (Abdala) and 62% (Soberana 02) efficacy in the latest phase of clinical trials, according to local health authorities.

More than one million of the 11.2 million Cubans have received the full prescription of these formulas as part of the clinical trials and intervention studies developed in parallel to the health one.

Cuba is not a member of the World Health Organization’s Covax mechanism created for middle- and low-income countries to have access to vaccines, nor has it purchased them on the international market.