COVID-19 continues to grow

The alarm is over and the confinement is still in everyone's memory as if it were a nightmare, but it is still too early to sing victory. In Europe it is largely under control and we have begun to recover lost normality, but in the rest of the world the pandemic continues to grow. In the last eight days of COVID-19, a whopping one million cases were detected and half a million deaths have already been recorded.

The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to encourage the danger of its virulence and contagiousness. In Germany, a new outbreak has emerged in slaughterhouses, affecting 360,000 people. And the same is happening in other countries like France, Italy or Spain itself, with outbreaks in Huesca or Lerida that force the maintenance of the state of alarm in phase two.

Right now the virus is spreading more aggressively through Southeast Asia, Africa and especially in America. The United States leads the way in the number of deaths, more than 150,000. In Latin America it is also increasing in all countries, starting with Brazil, with more than fifty thousand victims. All countries, just as in Europe, lack the health resources to deal with the pandemic.

Confinement measures and strict control of crowds of people are confirmed to be the best way to prevent contagion and the spread of infection. It is curious, as well as regrettable and logical, that it is the countries where their governments turned a deaf ear to the WHO's warnings that are being most affected.

It happened with the United States, and Donald Trump's disregard for the warnings, where the results have been more dramatic. Then there is Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro was a little less than mocking, telling people not to worry that it was just a "gripinha" (little flu). The "gripinha" continues to expand, the health minister has resigned, it is estimated that there will be close to one million people infected and the number of deaths is more than 50,000. Something similar happened in Mexico, where the president, Andrés Manuel López, recommended that people embrace each other, not walk away.

Something similar happened in Europe, where the unbalanced Premier Boris Johnson disdained the reality of the pandemic until he fell ill, for his own good. It is now the European country with the highest number of deaths: 42,700, more than in Italy, Spain and France. A case apart is Sweden, a modern and developed country that was put by some commentators as the only one where its government refused to establish rules of confinement. It is now the second European country after Luxembourg in which more deaths are counted as a function of its population.