Since 2020 and until April of this year, the COVID-19 pandemic registers in Las Tunas the disbursement of more than 60 million pesos, a figure that reveals the state efforts to deal with SARS-CoV-2, in the midst of a national and global economic crisis.
Las Tunas, Cuba.- Elder Bárcenas Santana, deputy director of Finance and Prices in this territory, said that at the end of the first quarter of 2021, spending exceeded 35 million 450 thousand pesos, an amount that compared to the average of each quarter of the last calendar illustrates an increase of 14 million 768 thousand 800 pesos aimed at containing the effects of the virus here.
"These expenses correspond to the 28 isolation centers enabled in the province, hospital institutions, 12 roadside containment points, entities such as the Provincial Center for Hygiene, Epidemiology and Microbiology and health care units such as polyclinics", the expert explained.
He also added: "The daily cost of a patient in an isolation center amounts to 1,500 pesos and a positive case generates almost double (2,900 pesos). As the number of infections increased in the last period, financing also grows."
On average, he added, a rapid test has a cost of 378.00 pesos, while a PCR test (Polymerase Chain Reaction) costs 495.00.
In this context, the state budget assumed the cost of food, medicines (recombinant Interferon ALFA 2-B and Oseltamivir), materials, and consumer items (chlorine, gloves, detergents, protective suits, plastic bags, masks protectors, swabs, kraft paper, among others) and transportation (of samples, workers, waste, and patients).
The entry into operation of the Molecular Biology Laboratory, with a processing capacity of 500 daily samples, Bárcenas Santana detailed, also implies the consumption of more than 4 million 171 thousand pesos, each month, due to the use of reagents that are imported.
At the end of April this year, he specified, only the Health sector has generated expenses of more than 29 million pesos.
This humanist budget is also used to care for the health and support teams facing the pandemic. Manuel Pérez Gallego, first secretary of the Party in the province, declared recently, that "The rotations of health care personnel range between seven and 10 days, in which it is necessary to vary about 640 Health workers; which. in a system of three rotations, implies about two thousand people each month.”
“And there are more than a thousand employees from other sectors who also assume, every month, different functions within the isolation centers. There would be, in total, more than four thousand people dedicated to these activities. Let us then imagine the effort to organize the work of this entire group and then create the rest conditions.”
While reflecting on the economic cost of the pandemic; how many resources are placed to ensure medical care and other services, despite limited financial assets and the carelessness and intense work behind, he added "We try to ensure that the population has an economic culture so that it can better value the effort made by the country to contain the pandemic.”
“It is not with the will of one person, several or an organism or a sector; but with the society as a whole and of those of us who have the responsibility to adopt the measures that we are going to triumph."
