HAVANA, Cuba.- Organization, in the most diverse aspects, is an essential principle in the current scenario the country lives in confrontation with COVID-19. This was highlighted during this Friday at the meeting headed by the President of the Republic, Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez and Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz, with the temporary working group for the prevention and control of the new coronavirus.
Following this line of action, the Head of State called to continue working and attending, with demand and a lot of detail, the organization of the different institutions where people are being cared for, whether patients confirmed to COVID-19, contacts of them or suspects. And within each of them, the operation of the several areas must also be carefully organized.
Diaz-Canel insisted on the priority to be given to the work of epidemiology specialists everywhere, “to guide ways of behaving, both health workers and patients.”
The use of nasobuco in hospitals is mandatory, the Cuban President said, as well as the adequate protection of the health staff working in them.
This is the time to anticipate even the slightest organizational aspect, Diaz-Canel pointed out, which will allow us to be able to adequately cope with the most complex days of the pandemic.
Speaking of organization, it was also inescapable in President Diaz-Canel´s words to return to the issue of lines, resellers and hoarders.
“It is very difficult to say we will not sell anything, nor can we take all the products to grocery stores, as the population asks us in many cases, so the issue is to finish organizing lines; and it’s an aspect that has a lot to do with the organization in the establishments themselves, but fundamentally with the people coming to them and how they behave. We have to overcome that with discipline,” he added.
Associated with this, Diaz-Canel also emphasized how work should be done to constantly improve mechanisms for the care of the most vulnerable groups and to continue bringing products closer to communities. “These are purposes that are present and we still do not achieve in a more absolute way,” he said.
After forty-five days of the first confirmed cases to COVID-19 in Cuba, Public Health Minister Jose Angel Portal Miranda commented that the country accumulates 36 134 samples carried out, 1, 285 of them have been positive, 50 of them in the last day.
In updating on the national situation, the Minister insisted on the issue of active research, an aspect on which work must be continued from the sector to make actions increasingly objective in each of the areas of health. “The results in identifying suspicious cases depend heavily on the quality we achieved,” the official pointed out.
Portal Miranda also reported that 39 local transmission events are open in the country, present in 29 municipalities and on the Island of Youth. The four most recent events of this type are located In Havana Centro Habana municipality, Los Sitios, Dragones and Cayo Hueso, and one in Guaicanamar, belonging Regla municipality.
Following the behavior of the disease in the Cuban capital, a territory with the highest number of positive cases to COVID-19 (517) and the second with the highest incidence rate per hundred thousand inhabitants, Governor Reinaldo Garcia Zapata updated on the actions they take in the different centers for the care of patients of this disease and the measures that have been taken to strengthen the work systems.
Referring to the new local transmission events open in the province, he said that various reinforcement measures have been gradually adopted, including the displacement of services, especially on busy Monte Street, into the various popular councils.
In addition, he detailed the official opening of the hospital of the University of Computer Sciences, where 600 new hospital capacities for suspicious cases are available.
Havana Governor said that in the capital, the processing system has also been strengthened to organize the transfer of cases through the Medical Emergency System in order to improve this service and make it possible to operate situations in real time.
In this regard, Deputy Prime Minister Roberto Morales Ojeda said that all the criteria from the population are constantly evaluated, which also contribute to warning on situations that may be happening. He commented on the conditioning in a group of institutions to admit contacts and suspicious cases, without having to go to hospitals that are intended for the care of people positive to the new coronavirus.
As it is usual in these meetings based in the Palace of the Revolution, the Governors of Villa Clara and Ciego de Avila updated via videoconference about the epidemiological situation currently shown by their respective provinces, both among the four territories with the highest rates of incidence of positive cases to COVID-19, only preceded by Island of Youth Special Municipality and Havana.