MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Increasing number of COVID-19 infections trigger alarms in Chile

Chile will carry on with its vaccination plan

Chile's Health Ministry (Minsal) Thursday reported 1,842 new cases of COVID-19, the highest number recorded in the last three months, marking a 53% rise compared to last week and 68% against the last two weeks.

 With the 1,842 infections in the last 24 hours, the total number infected people amounted to more than 1.67 million since the beginning of the pandemic, while deaths have reached 37,640 after 12 new fatalities.

Thursday's figures were also the highest since the 1,859 cases reported Jul. 22.

The positivity rate of PCR tests nationwide currently stands at 2.7%. In the Santiago Metropolitan Region it is 4%, while other 10 regions have yielded results below or around 2%.

According to El Mercurio and despite Chile's advanced vaccination plan, the country has the highest number of active cases per million inhabitants in South America, with a rate of 67 new daily positives per million inhabitants.

Brazil comes second with 50 new cases a day, Uruguay 46 and Bolivia 31.

About 14 million Chileans are said to have already taken a full vaccination scheme and over 4.5 million booster doses have been applied.

Of the 1,842 new cases, 16% were diagnosed through an antigen test, 25% stemmed from the Active Case Search (BAC) program and 26% of those who tested positive were asymptomatic.

Of the 1,842 new cases of COVID-19, 1,198 correspond to symptomatic people and 423 did not show any symptoms, while data regarding another 221 positive PCR tests was not made available to the press.

A total 1,676,019 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in Chile, with 8,591 still active and 1,626,200 have recovered. To date, 417 people are hospitalized in Intensive Care Units, of which 309 are on mechanical ventilation support.