Argentina reported more than 100,000 new infections of Covid-19 in 24 hours on Tuesday, pushing its total number of confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic past eight million.
In total, 8,041,520 people have been infected since March 2020, when the virus is first believed to have arrived in Argentina. Experts believe the true number is likely much higher.
Over the same period, 119,703 individuals who contracted Covid-19 have died, with 260 fatalities reported on Monday – a rise on the average of the previous seven days.
At present, 2,640 people are hospitalised with coronavirus in intensive care units, with the percentage of adult beds occupied in public and private sectors for all pathologies standing at 48.7 percent nationwide and 47.7 percent in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area (AMBA).
A total of 42,664 positive cases of coronavirus were registered in the last 24 hours in the province of Buenos Aires, bringing the number of people infected since the beginning of the pandemic in the region to 3,106,642.
More than 10,000 new cases were registered over the same period in Buenos Aires City, the nation's capital, which has recorded more than 900,000 infections since March 2020.
In recent weeks, Argentina's daily coronavirus count has soared, a fact most experts attribute to the arrival of the more contagious Omicron variant.
Health Minister Carla Vizzotti acknowledged on Tuesday that the situation facing Argentina had generated "tensions in the population," though she forecast that things would "calm" in March.
Speaking from Geneva, where she is attending a meeting of the World Health Organisation's Governing Council, Vizzotti said that Argentina is "coping with a wave" of new infections.
"We still don't know when the curve of infections caused by the Omicron variant will go down," Vizzotti revealed, though she said that the hope was that "in March there will be more calm" regarding the exponential increase in cases of the new variant.
"We don't know how much they will go down, but we do know that there will be less concerns," she said.
One of the government expert advisors, Dr Luis Camera, echoed that view in a radio interview this week, anticipating a decrease in infections in March.
In line with projections, Vizzotti highlighted Argentina's "encouraging" vaccination coverage figures to WHO officials, revealing that 90 percent of children over the age of three in the country have already started the vaccination schedule, while 78 percent have already completed it.
Overall, 74.5 percent of the entire population has been fully vaccinated, "exceeding the goal set by the World Health Organisation," she added.
With regard to the national inoculation campaign against Covid-19, Vizzotti assured that the country not only "has sufficient stock" of vaccines but that there are also "millions of scheduled deliveries," including the government's latest order with the Pfizer laboratory.
"We are regulating the arrival of new doses to play with the stock and the expiry date," explained the minister, adding that the strategy is to "have vaccines available with sufficient shelf life to distribute to the provinces."
– TIMES/AFP/NA/PERFIL
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