Uruguay has reached a new daily record with 79 deaths from COVID-19 registered on Thursday, while the total number of deaths amounts to 1,726, according to the latest balance of the National Emergency System (Sinae) as reported Infobae. The country added 4,412 new cases after carrying out 18,835 PCR tests.
Since the health emergency was decreed on March 13, 2020, Uruguay has accumulated 156,499 cases.
In addition, all the country’s departments are in the red zone according to the Harvard index, accumulating more than 25 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the last seven days.
Uruguay’s President Luis Lacalle Pou, spoke at a press conference to announce the extension, until April 30, of the measures announced on March 23, such as the absence of classes, the closure of free shops, gyms and sports clubs and limited hours of bars and restaurants until midnight.
However, he reiterated his intention not to add other regulations to restrict mobility. “We ask that, as much as possible, people move as little as possible.”
36.06% of the Uruguayan population has already been inoculated against the virus, most of these people with the first dose of the Chinese Sinovac‘s CoronaVac or the American Pfizer vaccine and a considerably smaller group already with the second shot. In absolute numbers, Uruguay has vaccinated 1,248,629 people, 996,155 with the first dose and 252,474 with the second, according to the web monitor developed by the Ministry of Public Health.
Also on Thursday, the country’s Ministry of Public Health reported that it will send part of the 48,000 doses it received from AstraZeneca to provinces near Brazil. This first batch will be distributed across Artigas, Rivera, Cerro Largo and Rocha, all regions bordering Brazil, due to the risks linked to the circulation of the Brazilian P1 variant.
These vaccines arrived in Montevideo on April 4 and are part of the WHO’s Covax program. Uruguay is set to receive 1.5 million doses from the initiative.
Beyond the vaccines from Covax, Uruguay acquired 3.8 million doses from Sinovac and Pfizer, of which some two million are already in the country. Lacalle Pou has further acquired 1.25 million more doses from the Sinovac, expected to arrive by May in the country.
