Authorities in Argentina set a new record for new coronavirus infections in 24 hours on Tuesday, but have eased rules to isolate triple-vaccinated patients to ensure “absolutely necessary services” operate, citing a “paradigm shift”.
According to the Ministry of Health, 134,439 cases of SARS-CoV-2 were confirmed in 24 hours, or some 34,000 more than the previous record announced on Friday. And 26 times more than the infections recorded in mid-December (about 5,000).
However, patient deaths due to complications of COVID-19 (50 to 24 hours) remain stable on average, without keeping pace with the outbreak. Nor did they reach, above all, the level of the approximately 500 deaths on the day of the end of May, in the most dramatic moments of the pandemic for Argentina.
Yesterday, the government announced an additional easing of isolation: those who came in contact with a case but received a third dose of COVID-19 vaccine “more than 14 days ago” and “have no symptoms” will be excluded, he said. Until yesterday, those who had this profile had to be isolated for five days.
Those who have come in contact with a case and have been fully vaccinated, that is, have taken a two-dose regimen five months earlier or less and are also asymptomatic, will be able to reduce the strict isolation, provided they are tested, in three to five days. For the unvaccinated, the ten-day isolation remains mandatory.
This framework is a “recommendation” and remains to be adopted by the provinces, in each of which a “different situation” prevails, said Health Minister Carla Witsotti.
The new relaxation – two weeks ago, the quarantine for symptomatic cases had gone from ten to seven days – is “adaptation to a new stage, completely different”, in terms of the evolution of the pandemic, Ms. Vitsotti explained. “There is a steady gap between the high number of infections and the number of hospital admissions and deaths,” he added.
This is to avoid the “very big” impact of lockdowns and absences of employees “on the health system and the absolutely necessary services, on air transport, on the fire brigade, on the police, on security, on energy, on the private sector”.
“What we are going to do is give more value to the vaccine, especially the booster dose,” Ms Witsotti said. More than the occupancy rate of intensive care units (40%), “what worries us are absences from workplaces.”
He referred to the examples of Uruguay and Spain, which “are undergoing an even greater paradigm shift”: they consider COVID “endemic”.
74% of Argentina’s 45 million people have received two doses of COVID-19 vaccine, and 17.3% have received the booster dose.
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