New COVID-19 transmission events in western Cuba

MATANZAS, Cuba, Jun 17 (ACN) The province of Matanzas is suffering a fresh COVID-19 outbreak marked by five new events of local transmission, according to Ailuj Casanova Barreto, provincial director of Public Health.

Dr. Casanova Barreto explained that these new events emerged at the Juan Gualberto Gómez International Airport, with 61 confirmed cases to date, and the Starfish Hotel in Varadero, with 44, come on top of the 10 previously existing ones.

“There are clusters throughout the province,” she stressed, “so we are working hard to identify and track suspected cases and positive contacts, a task essential to cut the chain of infection.”

Liván Izquierdo Alonso, first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba in Matanzas, referred particularly to the current situation in the town Los Arabos, with an incidence rate of 920 per 10,000 inhabitants in the last 15 days, a record totally out of the ordinary.

In this regard, he requested the specialists from the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology to support the local authorities in order to solve as soon as possible a problem created by the poor control of the health protocols designed to harness COVID-19 contagion.

The second doses of the vaccine candidate Abdala have already been administered to 25.7% of the population in several municipalities, where more than 261,000 people live.

The province of Matanzas is going through a phase of limited autochthonous transmission since January 16. It has reported 805 active cases in the last two weeks, for an incidence rate of 157.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.