RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Cuba registered on Tuesday the highest number of new daily cases since the beginning of the pandemic by reporting 1,183 positive cases, according to the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap).
The previous record was 1,162 infections and dated back to April 4, a month in which the first two deaths of children due to SARS-CoV-2 have also been reported on the island.
Cuba has 95,754 positive cases and 538 deaths, seven of them in the last day.
Today’s new cases, including 15 imported cases, were detected from 22,239 tests.
There are 24,039 people hospitalized in Cuban hospitals: 5,093 active cases – 26 critical and 33 serious – 3,531 with suspected symptoms and the rest under epidemiological surveillance.
As in previous days, the western provinces of Havana and Matanzas concentrate the highest number of infected people with 544 and 217 cases, respectively. These regions were followed today by eastern Holguin, which reported 80 positive cases.
The capital has the highest incidence rate of the disease in Cuba in the last fifteen days, with 365.5 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. These indicators made it once again the epicenter of the pandemic, despite maintaining in force measures such as a night curfew and the closure of schools, restaurants, bars, and beaches, among others.
Shortages resulting from the economic crisis force people to take to the streets and stand in long lines to buy food and other basic products, which complicates the containment of transmission.
The Caribbean country is developing five vaccine candidates against the coronavirus, two of which -Soberana 02 and Abdala- are in the third and final phase of clinical trials to evaluate their efficacy.
Simultaneously, “controlled intervention studies” have been launched in Havana and the east to massively administer these two formulas, including 1.7 million people in the capital.
These drugs do not yet have the authorization for emergency use or registration, a matter which the authorities expect to achieve in June based on the preliminary results of the last stage of tests of Soberana 02 and Abdala.
The Cuban government has not acquired vaccines in the international market and is not part of the Covax Mechanism created under the auspices of the World Health Organization to favor equitable access to immunization in middle and low-income nations.