With immunity cards, lockdowns, Chile forges own path

Bloomberg

Santiago’s central square looks a little like India this week, with police and army units enforcing a tight lockdown — no one moves without a permit. Down the street, it feels more like Sweden with its soft approach to the pandemic — the produce market there is thronged with shoppers and many stores are open.
Chile, South America’s richest country, is still a developing nation with 30% of its workforce in the informal economy and it’s forging a unique battle plan that has — so far, anyway — proved successful.
It has a system of rolling obligatory quarantines based on a formula combining an area’s new cases per capita, the size of its elderly population and access to healthcare. And it has created “immunity passes” that it will start issuing next week for those who’ve recovered from Covid-19, allowing them back into the workforce.
The goal, health officials say, is not to eradicate coronavirus but to contain it, enabling hospitals to cope.
Thus far, there have been just 147 recorded deaths in a nation of 18 million. There were 325 new infections on April 21, down from a peak of 534 on April 16, bringing the total to 10,832. Like everywhere, the true counts are probably higher.
While the number of reported cases across Latin America has been low, the official data of most countries in the region are unreliable, as has been seen with bodies in the street in southern Ecuador defying government figures.

Testing
Chile has tested a higher percentage of its residents than any other Latin American nation, suggesting that its numbers can be viewed with greater confidence. It’s similar in some ways to South Korea, which also closed and opened its country in sections, but Chile has
far less testing capacity and isn’t tracking the infected on mobile phones.
“We expect a non-exponential increase in cases, which is why we tighten and let go of” restrictions in some neighbourhoods, said Paula Daza, Health undersecretary in a recent interview with La Tercera. Still, the crisis is in its early stages and some experts think Chile has been mostly lucky to have escaped a higher infection rate.
The virus has spread out of the wealthy areas where it first appeared as people returned from summer holidays in Europe, and into the so-called vertical ghettos of high-rise blocks in central Santiago and poorer regional cities.
Chile started mass testing the population in the narrow alleys of one area of south Santiago this week after a spike in cases.
“We are doing well, so far, but it’s too soon to declare victory,” said Paula Bedregal, a public health expert and professor at the medical school of Universidad Catolica de Chile.
“We aren’t in winter yet, when things can get more complicated, and the virus is starting to appear more among more vulnerable groups.”