South African coronavirus variant spreads in Cuba

HAVANA, Cuba, Apr 21 (ACN) Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez warned today on Twitter that Cuban scientists have established a growing presence in the country of the COVID-19 variant discovered in South Africa.

He stressed that the onset of new coronavirus strains in the Island imposes a readjustment of health protocols to tackle this more contagious and lethal variant.

In another message, Diaz-Canel mentioned an exchange held Tuesday with intensivists involved in the fight against the epidemic, where he received information about patients in serious and critical condition and the measures to strengthen intensive care units in the country were evaluated.
“People need to go to the doctor if they have any symptom. Time is life,” he wrote.

Additional clinical-epidemiological protocols to curb the coronavirus death rate were announced at the government’s meeting with Cuban experts and scientists, where Minister of Public Health José Ángel Portal explained that they are the result of a systematic feedback with hospital and ICU staff.

Among the causes and conditions affecting COVID-19’s rising death toll in Cuba are the high incidence of the disease and the consequent increase in the number of patients in serious and critical condition. Other causes are related to the fact that patients are admitted with underlying pathologies that become worse due to the coronavirus and complicate their clinical management and some patients’ accelerated transition from a mild condition to a serious/critical status and even death in a short period of time.