In fifteen days, the Government expects that the COVID-19 infections will be as at the beginning of December 2021

In two weeks, The Government hopes that the contagion levels of COVID-19 are located as they were at the beginning or middle of last month.

According to him vice Minister of Governance and Health Surveillance of the Ministry of Public Health (MSP), José Ruales, there is a case reduction, which is not minimal, since he argued that they were increasing 300% per week.

He added that the previous week there were about 50,000 cases and if it continued at that rate for these days there would be 150,000.

“What there is is a very important reduction of what we call the epidemiological curve (…) it goes up to a certain point, stops and then starts to go down and we are seeing that it is going down at the same speed that it increased”he said in a radio interview.

In this way, he justified the return to classes on a voluntary basis which came into force on Monday the 24th. He also maintained that school establishments are not points of infection.

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He pointed out that there is a downward trend but there is a risk in relation to the adoption of a traffic lights for COVID, in which the colors red, yellow or green have been established.

The official stated that if the reduction in transmission speed occurs in the same way as the increase, it is expected that in fifteen days, Ecuador is in the contagion levels early or mid December.

Between December 1 and 8 there were 3,177 new cases, while between January 15 and 21 there were 50,632 new infected.

It should be remembered that the first case of the omicron variant, which is considered more contagious, was detected on December 14, 2021.

Ruales pointed out that risk variables such as occupancy of hospital beds, contagion trend in each canton, epidemiological risk which is measured, for example, by the percentage of the population vaccinated.

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As an example, he stated that Quito have a 92% of the total of the vaccinated population, and despite the fact that there are high rates of contagion, it does not have the same rates of occupancy of beds or mortality as it has Guayaquil, where the inoculation reaches a 82%.

He noted that in Guayaquil, there is a decrease in the number of daily cases reported: on January 11 there were 2,843; on January 15, 1,157; on January 18, 1015; and on January 22, 834.

With respect to mortality in the main port, According to the official, the COE of Guayaquil does not use international criteria, and according to the MSP, there is a average of 9 deaths per day in the registered health establishments, which are the ones that report to them, while what the Guayaquil mayor’s office does is go look for the information in the cemeteries.

He mentioned that these data are possibly true, but have not yet entered the official system and so they may be late.

In the recent week, the city of Guayaquil, counted 19 deaths on average because of the virus.

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Regarding the Carnival holiday, which is coming up, he said: “If we see that there is already less pressure in the hospitals, -what we basically want is to avoid serious cases, that they become complicated and that they saturate the hospitals and we cannot attend to them- ; If we are going to solve these problems, we will remove the restrictions again and we will define specific conduct criteria for the Carnival”.

The government awaits the process of the so-called Pandemic law, which is being analyzed in the Assembly, which would establish the obligation for municipalities to adopt the decisions of the national Emergency Operations Committee (COE).