Dreaming and doing

HAVANA, Cuba, Mar 17 (ACN) When COVID-19 arrived in Cuba a year ago, alarms went off before the horrifying images of first-world intensive care units overwhelmed by the number of infected people and the lack of diagnostic devices. We even heard of a case where the doctors chose to ventilate a young man over an old man who had little chance of survival and there were no lung ventilators to spare.

Faced with that bleak panorama and the increasingly suffocating economic siege of the United States, Cuba had to resort, once again, to the ingenuity of its people to overcome the situation as little hurt as possible. And 12 months later the country had come up with five SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates and several medical devices to cope with its virulence.

It was precisely about dreaming of and doing things to become as self-sufficient as possible and linking scientific institutions and universities that Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez talked about with scientists and experts whom the Government consults to fight the epidemic.

Doctor of Sciences José Luis Fernández Yero took stock of what has been done so far to make diagnoses through molecular techniques and underscored the production of Cuban swabs, whereas the National Biopreparations Center managed to develop the first Cuban means of virus transport, design to collect and transfer patient samples. Furthermore, the Center for Advanced Studies developed a diagnosing device for the magnetic extraction of RNA using nanotechnology, a key step in the PCR testing process.

Other accomplishments, ranging from a device to take and purify 96 PCR samples at a time to a non-invasive ventilator and the prototype of an electrical impedance thoracic tomography, were also described.

COMBIOMED, a major digital medical technology enterprise whose products are used in all intensive care units, has produced monitors, pulse oximeters, infusion pumps, crash carts and defibrillators now in use in many Cuban hospitals. It is also developing high-performance pulmonary ventilators for adults and children in intensive care and a Cuban-designed anesthesia machine.

Meanwhile, Doctor of Science Raul Guinovart Diaz, dean of the School of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Havana, displayed the curves of COVID-19’s possible course, which "is not favorable and calls for new measures to break those forecasts", the President remarked.

Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said in turn that the said mathematical models do not bode well and warned that the danger lies in confidence, so it is necessary to devise new methods and measures in order to make this fight more effective.