While the number of new cases reached a record in Honduras on Wednesday June 17 – with 643 more in twenty-four hours – the president of the country, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was admitted to a military hospital in Tegucigalpa after announcing that he and his wife had tested positive for the new coronavirus.
According to doctors who examined the head of state, Mr. Hernandez suffers from pneumonia. he "Has some pulmonary infiltrations (But) his general health is good ", Government spokesman Francis Contreras said. "Over the weekend I started to feel pain and today I was diagnosed with Covid-19 disease", the 51-year-old president said to the press on Tuesday. His wife, Ana Garcia, has also been infected, but she is currently "Asymptomatic".
Mr. Hernandez lamented the"Collapse" of the hospital system faced with the large number of sick and announced Tuesday the dispatch of brigades to San Pedro Sula (North) and the capital, Tegucigalpa, main centers of contagion, to treat at home people with coronavirus.
Juan Orlando Hernandez, nicknamed "JOH", has been head of Honduras since 2013. He was suspected by the New York Prosecutor's Office – who found his brother Tony, in October 2019, of drug trafficking – of having touched millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers, including ex-Mexican cartel boss “El Chapo” Guzman. His re-election in November 2017 had been contested by the opposition during harshly repressed demonstrations. In 2019, new protests erupted to demand his departure, after the promulgation of two decrees accused of privatizing health and education.
Hospitals already saturated
According to an official count, Honduras has registered more than 10,000 reported cases of coronavirus as of June 17, a figure to be taken with caution, as the country performs few tests. The increase in the number of new cases accelerated from June 9. On that date, it went from 200 new cases per day on average, to almost 500. Until reaching 643 on June 17, a record.
Hospitals in a country that has invested very little in its public health system are, in fact, already saturated. And if confinement was decreed very early, on March 16, when the country had only six cases, it is only very partially respected by an impoverished population who have no choice but to go out to find day-to-day resources.
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