Colombia surpassed this Saturday the symbolic threshold of one million cases of covid-19 registered in the country since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the official balance of the Ministry of Health.
According to the report of that portfolio, in the last 24 hours 8,769 new infections were reported, which raised the total to 1,007,711 since the first case was detected on March 6, from Italy.
The number of deaths rose to 30,000, 198 of them recorded in the last balance that, according to the authorities, does not reflect the number of deaths that occurred in those 24 hours, but collects data from the last 10 days.
With 50 million inhabitants, Colombia is the eighth country to exceed one million infections, after the United States, India, Brazil, Russia, Argentina, Spain and France.
In an official ceremony in Chinchiná, Caldas (center), President Iván Duque highlighted the fact that it is one of the countries with the lowest number of deaths per inhabitant on the continent.
We did much better than other countries. But I do not say this to make us feel triumphant, I say it with the idea that we protect ourselves more, defended the conservative president.
According to the National Institute of Health (INS), Colombia ranks tenth in the continent in this area, with an average of 561 deaths per million inhabitants: almost half of Peru (1,016) and about a quarter less than Brazil (719).
The Colombian government decreed a national confinement on March 25, but it was relaxing the measures before the collapse of the economy, until betting from September 1 on a strategy based on self-care and the generalized use of masks in public spaces.
With 308,645 cases registered in seven and a half months of epidemic, Bogotá accounts for a third of all infections and is the city most affected by the virus.
Duque claims to have allocated resources close to 11% of GDP (some 31,000 billion dollars) to attend the emergency.
Still, urban unemployment rose to a historic 19.6% in August amid a slow economic recovery.
The new
coronavirus pandemic has caused at least 1,145,847 deaths and more than 42,262,290 infections in the world since the office of the World Health Organization (WHO) in China reported the appearance of the disease in December.