Municipalities start taking actions to respond to COVID

Diario El Mundo reports:

San Miguel, La Unión and Sensuntepeque (Cabañas) have closed their municipal markets and other businesses installed in the commercial areas of those three departmental capitals. Sonsonate and San Francisco Gotera (Morazan) would be taking new actions in the next few hours.

The mayor of Sonsonate, Roberto Aquino, announced on his official Twitter account that together with his legal team and constitutional lawyers they met so that the measures to be implemented in his municipality respect the Rule of the Law.

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The mayor’s office of La Unión was the first to take strict measures. The Municipal Civil Protection Commission headed by the mayor Ezequiel Milla agreed to close the municipal market for seven days, a period in which they begun to disinfect and fumigate.

In order not to affect vendors, they were authorized to install their stalls in peripheral markets since last Friday. People with more than 37.5 degrees of temperature are not allowed to enter.

According to Diario Co-Latino, the mayor of Soyapango is going to ask for permission to implement State of Exception in the area:

The mayor’s office will seek to reach agreements with private companies, such as banks, so that users are served acording to their IDs. Citizens with document ending with numbers between 0 to 4 one day, and from 5 to 9 the next day, to halve the circulation of people.

The mayor said that Soyapango has experienced an increase in deaths from COVID19 that went from 15 in May to 154 in June, while deaths from heart attacks and other causes have skyrocketed, totaling 408 cases, along with deaths from the pandemic.

Smart epidemiological ring-fencing

Authorities of San José Villanueva (La Libertad) are working with the Francisco Gavidia University research team to address the 10 cases reported in the area.

El Diario de Hoy reports:

Despite that official records of the central government highlight 10 infections in that jurisdiction, as of this Sunday (July 5th) the municipality is promoting the novel strategy with which it intends to counter the SARS-CoV2 virus.

“Basically we estimate that it would take between two, three months to take the municipality to zero (cases of COVID-19). It is a simple municipality because there are few cases, but it is complicated because it is a dormitory, people do not work there, which poses the risk of bringing the virus from outside”, explained to El Diario de Hoy the UFG researcher, Óscar Picardo, who participates in the project.

The Smart Epidemiological Fence is based on two principles: education and the use of technologies, that is, it is an approach “without coercion, without closure of anything”, said the expert.

“What we are looking for first is to design a strong educational campaign, we have mapped all the communities and the idea is to create a kind of traffic light based on the fact that all communities are in yellow, on alert, and that there is the possibility of turning them to green (safe) or red, depending on what happens”, the UFG researcher explained to this newspaper.

“Secondly, there is also a geolocation component. We are going to carry out some surveys, we use very simple data: age, gender, place of residence and if they are in an exposed category, not having symptoms, a second category would be those who may have symptoms, a third would be infected and a fourth category infected (SIC). That information goes to a map that will have points (colored), if it does not have any symptoms, green; if they have symptoms or are suspicious, yellow; if there is any infected, red; and if there is any recovered, blue”, detailed Picardo.

On Monday (June 6) they will start designing the visual campaign of the project in stores and businesses and on Tuesday they plan to meet with the Medical College to receive feedback and recommendations in this regard.

Bukele’s reaction

President Nayib Bukele’s government is against these targeted confinements and insists on a strict 15-day quarantine, guaranteed by an exception regime that restricts constitutional guarantees of mobility.

In fact, Bukele questioned the Gavidia University model, which has sparked interest in other municipalities, and even called Picardo ‘crazy’, which earned him harsh criticism.