Colombia's Bogota to enter lockdown
Colombia's capital can enter a strict quarantine until Tuesday due to rising coronavirus infection quantities and suspicions a new variant of the virus is circulating, Mayor of Bogota Claudia Lopez said on Thursday.Rigorous quarantines were been imposed on three Bogota neighborhoods this week to control soaring infections, which Lopez said could be caused by a latest variant of the virus 1st identified in britain.
People through the entire capital will come to be largely confined with their homes from midnight on Thursday until several o'clock each morning on Tuesday, said Lopez, declaring a crimson alert in the town. Non-essential retailers and businesses will end up being closed and one individual per home will be permitted to buy food or medicine. "We happen to be confronting a new strain of COVID which is very possibly previously circulating in Bogota," Lopez told a news meeting. "We can't see any different reason behind the viral load we have found in patients."
U.K. case quantities have risen sharply, influenced in part by a fresh variant of the virus that is up to 70% even more transmissible than the initial. But Colombia's wellbeing ministry said there is no evidence the variant acquired reached the country.
"Right now there is no scientific evidence that accelerating COVID-19 transmission found in Colombia could be attributed to the new British strain," Ministry of Wellbeing director for epidemiology and demography Julian Fernandez Nino said found in a statement. Colombia has reported a lot more than 1.73 million coronavirus attacks and 45,067 deaths from COVID-19, the disease it causes.
In Bogota, which counts for over 25 % of national conditions, occupancy of intensive care units for coronavirus stands at 83.9%, regarding to local government figures.The neighborhoods of Usaquen, Suba, and Engativa will stay in stringent quarantine as planned until Jan. 18 and rigorous quarantines will be expanded in the neighborhoods of Kennedy, Fontibon, and Teusaquillo until Jan. 22, Lopez said.
