HAVANA: Cuba is bringing back hundreds of doctors working abroad and converting hotels into isolation centres and hospitals in order to battle a COVID-19 crisis that is overwhelming healthcare and mortuary services in parts of the Caribbean island.
One in five tests are positive, four times the benchmark 5 per cent positivity rate cited by the World Health Organization. The seven-day average for confirmed COVID-19 deaths is around 52 per million inhabitants, six times the world average, although the real number could be much higher accounting for potentially undiagnosed cases.
"I witnessed queues of more than 20 hours, people dying in the corridors ," wrote Ana Iris Diaz, a professor at the university of the central Cuban city of Santa Clara and self-professed"revolutionary", in a Facebook post that went viral this week. "We are at the limit of our capacity for infrastructure, resources, medicine and oxygen," President Miguel Diaz-Canel told a government meeting on COVID-19 on Monday.Cuba was a COVID-19 success story last year, managing to contain the outbreak, dispatching doctors all over the globe to help and even developing its own vaccines, which it started applying in recent months.
Also infected and struggling to breathe, he said he was doing inhalations with yagruma leaves but sometimes could not even heat water because of the power outages that have become more frequent lately.