During the long months of last year, Uruguay – its government, its president – taught the world how to handle the COVID-19 crisis well. While the planet was overflowing with cases and the residents of the neighborhood – especially the two giants – were bursting at all its seams, the small Latin American country was exhibiting figures good enough to be the cover of foreign media due to its exceptionality. In June, when the ‘zero cases’ of COVID was repeated two consecutive days, the Government was about to declare the virus defeated and people were about to take to the streets to celebrate a new ‘maracanazo’, a new impossible victory of the model dwarf.
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But Uruguay is currently, in relative numbers, much worse than Argentina, much worse than Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, and even worse than Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, which is experiencing its hardest moments of the crisis. With 837 cases per day per million inhabitants, according to data from the Our World in Data portal last week, Uruguay surpassed Brazil in the daily rate of infections and is among the countries in which the virus is growing the most on a global scale. Taking as a reference the 14-day incidence rate, the one usually used in Spain -which is now close to 200 cases in our country-, that of Uruguay is 1,359 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in two weeks, according to data from Johns Hopkins University .
On April 7, the National Emergency System reported almost 4,000 new cases and the next day about 3,700, a large number for a country of just over 3.5 million inhabitants. It had already been a shock when a couple of weeks before the 2,000 border had been crossed. As of October 31, 2020, the average number of infections every 24 hours barely exceeded thirty. Five months later, it increased a hundredfold.
The deaths, which continue to be proportionally lower than in the rest of the region, follow the same upward path: in the first seven days of April, more Uruguayans died with COVID than in all of 2020. Of the nearly 1,300 deaths that the country registers since March 13 of last year, the official start of the pandemic, some 300 have occurred in the first week of this month, more than 40 per day; the total number of deaths between March and December 2020 had been 180, an average of just over one per day.
Today the intensive care units are on the verge of saturation. The Uruguayan Society of Intensive Care Medicine warned last week that, if it continues at this rate, it is a matter of days before doctors have to choose who to try to save and who not to, and that the drugs to treat these critically ill patients will run out.
“Coming back from 30 hours of work. The requirement of the system is already seen to the limit. (…) We are doing magic so as not to limit patients in the emergency,” internist Federico Rivero wrote on Twitter.
Most people don’t understand that this month things are going to be serious, and serious people are going to die. I don’t see the fear that there should be, nor the people guarded as they should be. Hopefully the Vaccination reduces the times of the storm, which has already arrived and will last a few days.
– Federico Rivero (@federive_uy) April 7, 2021
And although it is still far from Dantesque scenes like those in Manaus (Brazil), if things don’t stop, they will go there, say leaders of the Medical Union. Something unthinkable just a few months ago, when self-promotion was the rule and it seemed that the pandemic would elegantly haggle over Uruguay.
On the positive side of the balance is the high percentage of vaccination: slightly less than 25% of the population has received a first dose of one of the two immunizers used (Sinovac and Pfizer), the highest proportion in South America after Chili. But at this rate of growth in infections, with the expansion of the virulent Brazilian variant P1 throughout the country and in the absence of strong measures to restrict mobility – by express option of the Government – “it is very difficult for the vaccine to win the race to COVID-19”, said last Thursday the director of the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo, Carlos Battyány.
Bet on “responsible freedom”
Both the Medical Union and the societies of specialists from various disciplines and the Honorary Scientific Advisory Group (GACH), a body of high-level scientists created by the Executive itself at the beginning of the pandemic, have asked President Luis Lacalle Pou to restrict the mobility to a much greater degree than what has been done up to now and that economically and adequately compensates the affected populations. But Lacalle Pou refuses one or the other. His commitment was, is and will continue to be, he said, to the “responsible freedom” of Uruguayans.
“I suggest changing the idea of responsible freedom to being responsible for freedom,” said Gonzalo Moratorio, director of the Laboratory for Experimental Evolution of Viruses at the Pasteur Institute in Montevideo and the only Latin American scientist to be highlighted among the best in the world by Nature magazine in 2020 . .
I suggest changing RESPONSIBLE FREEDOM to being RESPONSIBLE for FREEDOM. Freedom that we yearn for and that only by helping the vaccination process with greater mobility restrictions can we achieve again. Acting today implies losing much less tomorrow, and from every point of view.
– Gonzalo Moratorio (@gonzamoratorio) April 6, 2021
In an April 6 tweet, Moratorium urged the government to act. “Only by helping the vaccination process with greater mobility restrictions can we regain the freedom we yearn for,” he wrote.
Lacalle Pou, from the right, usually says that it is not managed with ideological criteria, that those who have “blindness” of this type are on the opposite sidewalk and that he has learned that that of the right and left is a thing of the past and that his it is a pragmatic government.
In the absence of stronger regional leadership, the Uruguayan president has become a benchmark for the liberal right in this part of the continent. Largely due to the brilliance that he brought out at the time from the pandemic numbers, when in times of fat cows he called daily press conferences in which he flirted with journalists, crowed about the Uruguayan exceptionality, showed himself surfing on some beach and liked it. to exhibit his harmony of that time with the scientists of the GACH.
At the initial moment of the crisis, the Government decided on some restrictions (suspension of face-to-face classes, public shows of all kinds, closure of shopping centers, limitation of transport, passage to teleworking in the State), but the Uruguayans went further of those measures and all those who could confined themselves. For a month and a half there was not a soul on the streets.
This self-confinement, the scientists explain – with the GACH at the head – was what allowed Uruguay to contain the advance of the virus. Today the Government refuses to go down that path and congratulates the GACH for its “selfless task” but does not listen to it: the economy is not giving, he says. Social movements and the political opposition argue that it can, arguing that the country has overabundant foreign currency reserves and relatively cheap access to contingent credit. (The harshest tone comes, as often, from the social movement. The Broad Front, which governed between 2005 and 2020, plays the responsible opposition and moderates its responses. Sometimes it becomes inaudible).
At the beginning of the pandemic, Uruguayans confined themselves and there were very few people on the streets Télam
Success could not last by betting everything on individual responsibility. The accompanying measures in favor of the sectors most affected by the closure of activities were so weak that towards the middle of last year, ECLAC ranked Uruguay as the Latin American country that had made the least social investment to combat the effects of the pandemic, less than 4% of its GDP.
Orthodoxly concerned with reducing the fiscal deficit, the Government maintained during the crisis the same liberal postulates that inspired the far-right, right-wing and center parties that make up the winning coalition in the 2019 elections. The very meager aid received by some categories of workers during these months were compensated by cuts of 15% in public spending, fundamentally in the social area.
Had it not been for the protests by scientists, which this time found a massive echo, investment in science and technology would also have been cut down at a time when doctors, virologists, intensivists and nurses are on the front line of combat and research laboratories the beaten state university have been able to create and implement virus tracking tests or conceive and manufacture respirators.
Hunger and poverty
On the other hand, the Executive increased taxes and public rates, and did nothing to stop evictions, which have been growing as the crisis has increased. The single PIT-CNT trade union center and social and political organizations proposed a minimum emergency income for the most vulnerable that would have meant only about 500 million dollars of spending.
“We can’t afford it,” the government responded. And it swept away in parallel with a stroke of the pen any imposition on private capital. It is the businessmen who “will get us out of the crisis when the pandemic ends“, Lacalle Pou said last year and repeated a couple of weeks ago. The president of the PIT-CNT, Fernando Pereira, says that not even the International Monetary Fund, which has proposed countercyclical measures and financing the closure of non-essential activities with a substantial increase in social spending, has such an orthodox position. And that, in his opinion, is a sign that something is very wrong.
The government waits. Wait, for example, for the vaccination to progress. But hunger and misery are also advancing. In one year, the number of poor people increased by more than 100,000. And they are at the mercy of the people. If the new and old poor can eat, it is more thanks to the 700 “popular pots” that are swarming throughout the country, supplied by their own neighbors and social organizations, than to State aid.
In the western neighborhoods of Montevideo, a Popular and Solidarity Coordinator (CPS) encompasses some 14 networks of pots and picnic areas. “We are seeing scenes very similar to those that had such an impact on the 2001-2002 crisis,” Brenda Bogliaccini, a member of the coordinator, tells elDiarioAR. “There is hunger like then, and an absent State like then. Along with the health emergency, a less visible but very present social emergency is installed.
In El Cerro, a traditional working-class neighborhood in Montevideo that became impoverished as Uruguay emptied of industries, there is, among others, the El Tobogán pot. Lita, one of her cheerleaders, points out: “30 kilos of rice and the 90-liter pot of lentil stew and it didn’t hit us. He didn’t tell us. Every day more neighbors come.
