MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Covid-19 cases on the rise in Chile

“A very strong risk communication campaign is needed to get vaccinated,” Paris underlined

Chilean health authorities recorded 98 casualties attributable to Covid-19 between Jan. 1 and March 22, 2025, with a total of 5,191 confirmed cases. The fatalities were 76.5 years old on average with an almost equal distribution between genders, while patients with chronic conditions like hypertension or diabetes were affected the most.

Experts, including Paula Daza, Enrique Paris, and Sebastián Ugarte, stress the need to boost vaccination efforts as pandemic fatigue and insufficient communication hinder participation.

They propose pairing Covid and flu vaccines, using mobile units for high-risk groups and strong public risk communication campaigns to emphasize vaccination’s importance. Enhanced education, messaging, and accessible vaccinations are key strategies to reduce mortality, they also stressed. The specialists highlighted that 44% of respiratory virus tests were positive in week 12, up from 34.3% in week 11, with the elderly and unvaccinated or under-vaccinated most at risk.

“It is important to understand that the virus is a respiratory condition that particularly develops in those who have risk diseases, [namely] chronic diseases, hypertension, diabetes, and the very elderly, who are generally those with chronic diseases. An infection such as the coronavirus can produce a serious disease. The person can end up hospitalized and sometimes become over-infected, infected by other things and, obviously, unfortunately, they can die,” former Public Health Undersecretary Daza stressed.

“The truth is that, if one looks at figures, we have persistent cases of Covid in the country, which continue to appear, and we also have in the last week 66 patients hospitalized for Covid. In general terms, the most serious patients are characterized by being an older adult population, over 65 years of age,” said Ugarte, who heads the Critical Patient Unit at the Clínica Indisa.

“Normally, people who do not have sufficient antibodies are dying. They can be people who have not been vaccinated or who were vaccinated a long time ago; older adults with immunosenescence and people who have chronic diseases that complicate Covid,” former Health Minister Paris also explained.

Daza also noted that the slowdown in vaccination was due to “pandemic fatigue” coupled with not “enough information or communication of the importance of the vaccination campaign against Covid.”

“It is very important that just as the influenza vaccination campaign is communicated,” people “get vaccinated against Covid,” she added.

“We have to set up national strategies, but also focused on those groups where we know that people need to be vaccinated,” Daza insisted.

“A very strong risk communication campaign is needed to get vaccinated. Why? It protects and avoids falling into the intensive care unit; it protects and avoids death. It does not prevent infection, but it avoids greater evils, and this must be prevented,” Paris also noted.

”Apart from the communicational message that the government should deliver (to encourage the vaccination process), most of the diseases caused by respiratory viruses can be mistaken for a common cold in their milder cases, at least initially. And only the most severe cases have a more characteristic evolution, and that one comes to suspect that it is a Covid disease or a severe influenza,” Ugarte warned.