The President assured that the Government will seek to make its restriction measures more flexible, so that “they are in accordance with those needs now, not only health but also economic”
“Less and less will be the ‘stay at home‘ and more and more will be the ‘work, but take care‘, ‘if you have to move, do it if necessary, but take care of yourself,'” said President Carlos Alvarado, this past Friday, in a Press conference.
The President expressed this when he was consulted about the economic implications of the sanitary restrictions to contain the novel Coronavirus Pandemic, and the possibility that restrictions on mobility and commercial operations are relaxed.
The President also recalled that the country will start a phase of greater openness as of August 22nd and added that new measures will be taken, starting in September, to simplify the restrictions that are still in force and that seek to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
“We understand that, at the moment we are in, we need to adapt, we need to implement other measures that are in line with those needs now, not only health but also economic,” he added.
“In the measures that we will announce shortly, there will be optimizations in this area that will be communicated in a timely manner, but what these optimizations aim at is to simplify everything related to these restrictions, understanding that we need to move in that direction,” he stressed.
President Alvarado affirmed that in order to apply a greater flexibility of measures, the population will have to assume greater responsibilities, so that it can be more open without implying a saturation of hospital resources.
More Responsibility
“This will mean that more and more personal responsibility, empowering actions and caring for people will be increasingly important, as well as businesses and municipalities. It is going to be more and more important for us to be successful”.
Alvarado assured that the measures will continue seeking to maintain a balance between economic and public health criteria, and was emphatic that until now the most restrictive measures have served to increase hospital capacity and avoid a collapse of national medical centers at an early stage of the emergency.
“This we have done during the last months and weeks has allowed us to do things as important as saving time and hospital capacity, for example”. “When the pandemic started we had an availability of about 64 beds in intensive care units, if I’m not mistaken, and today we happily exceed an installed capacity of more than 200 beds. That has been thanks to time that we have won and have not reached saturation“, he concluded.
So far, the government has applied a “hammer and dance” analogy; that is, an alternation of moments of greater and lesser commercial openness and private mobility. Along these lines, President Alvarado said that more and more will be sought to “learn to dance” with the Virus, so that more and more activities can be resumed in a controlled manner.
Restriction has saved lives
Alvarado also took advantage of his intervention to defend the value of the vehicle circulation restrictions applied so far, which, he said, “have saved lives.” The President stressed that they not only have a direct relationship with the number of COVID-19 infections but also serve to reduce deaths and hospitalizations due to traffic accidents, which also involve hospital efforts.
The President affirmed that the measure will be simplified and optimized; however, he preferred not to provide further details. “There is a very high correlation, and I would dare to say that beyond that there is a causality, between the implementation of the sanitary vehicle circulation restrictions with the reduction of cases. That is, this measure has saved lives,” he said, before a query about this matter.
