PAHO warns of double COVID-19 cases in El Salvador last week

Dr. Garissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAO), issued a report on the status of COVID-19 on the U.S. continent on Wednesday, and amid a series of warning calls to various countries, “Central America is reporting the highest number of deaths to date, with one-third of patients admitted to hospital today. He later said, “COVID-19 infections are accelerating in Panama, Belize and El Salvador, where new cases have doubled in the last seven days.”

This report by PAHO does not match the data recorded on the covid19.gob.sv page by the Ministry of Health of El Salvador, where it reflects that 149 to 156 cases have been maintained per day since May 15, 2021. The last update date is May 30th.

When entering the Daily Reports tab on the said website, the latest detailed information is from April 22, 2021, so they are already more than a month late.

You can read: Caution: UES investigation finds California variants of COVID-19 already in circulation in El Salvador

Director Etienne, who specializes in health management, health systems and health care, said, “Unfortunately, we have seen misinformation about COVID-19 throughout our region, raising suspicions about tested health practices, often in the context of political controversy.”

In a televised interview earlier in the week, Health Minister Francisco Aleppo of El Salvador did not report this copy of the PAHO warning cases in El Salvador, but rather said that stability has been in place since February 2021. There are 120 to 170 cases a day.

Regarding how information about COVID-19 is being handled in the country, Minister Alabe said before a session of the legislature on Tuesday night, “There is another epidemic besides the # COVID19 epidemic: misinformation”; And the President’s Press Secretariat added in a tweet, “In order to combat the latter (misinformation), it was decided to reserve some information on dealing with the epidemic.”

Roberto Whitre, a Salvador surgeon and epidemiologist, responded to Minister Alaba’s statement, saying on Twitter that “if the data were public and transparent – accessible to government, academics and professionals for analysis – there would be less ‘misinformation’.” The real information is that this information is reserved. Science is science only, if it can be verified and copied ”.

You may also be interested in: Vaccination: Great success in public health

According to the decision of the Ministry of Health, all information about the COVID-19 vaccination program is on hold until March 2026; And data on PCR-RT tests to detect government-made virus will only be available until June 2022.

Beyond the allocation of this information by the government of Salvador, the increase in cases due to SARS-COV-2 is occurring across the American continent, as Edin explained, “Since the beginning of the new year, we have seen a rapid increase in epidemics. In the first 5 months of 2021, the number of cases and deaths in our region has doubled. ”

From private medical care, epidemiologist Dr. Ivan Solano Leva has been warning in recent days that “despite having received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine, we find in our practice a high frequency of patients developing COVID”, which was produced by the Chinese laboratory Sinovak.