Táchira State faces increase in Covid-19 cases amid shortage of medicine and medical personnel

Covid-19 cases continue to increase in the country, especially in the state of Táchira, where citizens do not have water service to deal with the virus and healthcare centers suffer from a shortage of supplies.

The director of the Central Hospital of San Cristóbal, Régulo Lobo, denounced that the four floors that constitute the isolation area of of the healthcare center is 90% occupied.

Lobo added that only one bed is available in the Intensive Care Unit, where an average of five people have died a day in the last few days.

He indicated that the hospital suffers from a deficit of specialized personnel in the care areas for coronavirus, a situation that keeps the authorities very worried because they expect an increase in cases in the coming weeks.

The director of the Hospital de San Cristóbal stressed that they do not have wide-spectrum antibiotics to assist COVID patients, so family members must buy them, a situation that could affect the evolution of patients, because due to a serious economic crisis most of family members do not have the resources to purchase these medications.

Lobo reiterated the call to increase prevention measures, in order to avoid being part of the statistics of this pandemic.

Given the accelerated increase in COVID-19 cases in the State, the director of Civil Protection Táchira, Jaiberth Zambrano, reported that as of this Wednesday, January 6th, a census was started in the upper part of the city of San Cristóbal, where it is estimated that there are the most possible sources of contagion, to locate possible patients in order to mitigate the pandemic and prevent it from continuing to spread.