Feature: Havana faces its deadliest COVID-19 surge

HAVANA, May 1 — “Show me your love: pay me no visits,” reads a sign hanging on the front door of Maria Rodriguez, a 51-year-old engineer living in Havana’s Vibora district.
With the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc nationwide, thousands of people across the country have reinforced cleaning and disinfecting procedures while staying home, and only go out to buy food and daily supplies.
Rodriguez, a mother of two adolescent sons, told Xinhua that individual protection continued to be fundamental to minimize the risk of contagion with the virus in Havana, the epicenter of the pandemic in Cuba.
“During the third wave of the pandemic, we should stay cautious. Now more people are getting infected with the contagious disease,” she said. “It is important to protect our lives and that of our relatives and friends.”
On Friday, Havana, the island’s most populous city, logged 675 out of the country’s 1,046 new cases. Over the past two days, 30 people have died of COVID-19 in the Caribbean nation, 24 of whom resided in Havana.
In a morning tweet, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said: “I have ordered to check the work in the intensive care units and to dig into all that is causing the COVID-19 outbreak, focusing not only on the aggressiveness of new strains circulating across the country.”
So far, the Cuban capital has had more than 50,000 COVID-19 cases, accounting for half of the COVID-19 infections recorded on the island since the beginning of the pandemic in March last year.
Home to 2.2 million out of the country’s 11 million inhabitants, Havana has seen a surge in daily infections, hospitalizations, and deaths following the Christmas break.
Partial lockdown measures have been enacted citywide, including restrictions on people’s movement during nightly hours, as well as the closure of gyms and cultural venues.
“When the pandemic is over, I will find a girlfriend,” 20-year-old Manuel Abreu told Xinhua. “Fully immunized people in Havana will have more chances to find couples. Millennials have also gone through a difficult time.”
Meanwhile, Havana’s Old Quarter, the country’s tourist site most visited by international tourists in pre-pandemic times, has turned into the municipality with the highest COVID-19 infection rate in Cuba.
According to the Cuban Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), by the end of May, nearly 1.7 million people in Havana will have received doses of the domestically produced COVID-19 vaccine candidates as part of an intervention study.
Francisco Duran, national director of hygiene and epidemiology at MINSAP, said that April 2021 had become the worst month of the pandemic on the island with 30,431 cases and 219 deaths so far.
“The results are not as expected,” he said, adding that he felt confident that the Cuban people would successfully stem the spread of the infections in the country. (Xinhua)