Haha, Nammu!

Here things are very dark feeling. It doesn’t help that the day is gray and foggy.


The other day, the Health Minister came out to say that the President should go down in history due to his great handling of the pandemic. How can anyone take him seriously after comments like that when you consider the current situation here? We say here, he’s a “lamebotas” bootlicker, like a brownnoser to the President. Then he tried to backpedal on his comments that we would be seeing improvements by now; but doubled down on the idea that we will reach heard immunity by June. Something that specialists not tied to the government think is unlikely. He continues to say that people are “immunized” by the vaccine, not “vaccinated”, when this vaccine often doesn’t confer immunity. There was another doctor on the national TV channel saying people will develop immunity. I guess being the national channel, he has to toe the government’s line too. The lying and gaslighting gets worse every day.

I almost feel badly for this guy on the forum for expats. He really seems to want to buy into the idea that the country is going to vaccinate itself out of this with Sinovac. He said he was looking at the numbers and there was a slight decrease in deaths among the 80+ population who were among the first to be vaccinated. I am not sure if that shows anything. It may just as likely be because of the constant ratcheting up of the restrictions over the last five weeks or so. If they are resulting in reduced mobility, that means that it is mainly younger people in essential jobs that are out and about. Different jobs have different exposure risks, but I’d say there is always some, plus many have to go to work on public transportation. We are seeing more people in their 40s and 50s, prime working age, in ICUs and dying. Many were also vaccinated in early- to mid-February because of their essential job. If you are over 80, you are probably retired and in quarantine, which is almost all the country, and only have your limited 2 times a week permits to go out. That may contribute to lowered deaths for older people and higher deaths for younger people lately.

I was reading about the case of Israel to sort of compare. They started vaccinating with Pfizer on December 19th. In January cases were still going up, but early February, they were seeing notable declines in cases. Here we started with health workers in the last week ofDecember. The first people got Pfizer, but those were probably only 20,000 doses. Then they shifted to Sinovac. More massive vaccinations started at the beginning of February, which are almost all Sinovac and a bit of Pfizer here and there. If we were following the trend in Israel, we should be seeing some sort of decline by now. Instead, ICUs are almost all full. Some regions have only 3% of their beds available. Unlike prior waves, the problem is that it’s bad everywhere. In the past, the virus sort of moved around by region so they could send people to hospitals in areas that had fewer cases. We have had over 7,000 new cases for the last 4 days and the hospital in Valparaíso, one of the major cities here, had to acquire 2 refrigerated containers because their morgue is full. Articles discussing the “Chilean paradox” of high vaccinations and no improvement in the numbers never seem to indicate that we are mainly using Sinovac, they say a mix of Pfizer and Sinovac, giving the impression their use is more or less equal.

One of my main concerns is what will happen if we don’t reach the promised herd immunity by June. How will people react if the government is still mandating lockdowns and masks and the virus is still making the rounds? Sadly, I think we could see protests that make October 2019 look like child’s play.

After 2 days of not being able to request permits to go out, the website that issues the permits crashed this morning.