Medellin doctors urge lockdown, humanitarian aid to resuscitate healthcare
April 22, 2021
Medellin medical organizations urged humanitarian aid and a two-week lockdown to resuscitate the collapsed healthcare system in Colombia’s second largest city.
The city of 2.5 million people entered in crisis last month after a new wave of coronavirus infections collapsed hospitals.
According to the Health Secretary of the Antioquia province, more than 99% of Medellin’s intensive care units (ICU’s) are full, which is collapsing emergency healthcare in multiple cities.
My shift begins. I have space in the ICU for two patients who are going through hell, but there is no ambulance to drive them. There are no ambulances available. Just to emphasize: the number of ICUs and their occupancy are only an indicator. The reality goes far beyond that and it’s shit!
Can Colombia prevent another lockdown amid Brazilian COVID-19 threat?
April 9, 2021
Some of Colombia’s largest cities have been forced to reinstate lockdowns as a new surge in COVID-19 infections is knocking down hospitals and slowing down vaccination efforts.
Health Minister Fernando Ruiz and Bogota Mayor Claudia Lopez declared an orange alert in the capital on Thursday, restricting its 7 million inhabitants’ access to shopping centers, banks and public buildings and a nightly curfew.
Authorities in Medellin and Barranquilla were forced to impose a 24-hour curfew until early Tuesday after their hospital systems collapsed.
The Brazilian threat
Valle del Cauca Governor Clara Luz Roldan warned that she may shut down Cali and surrounding cities as a COVID-19 variant from Brazil appears to be saturating hospitals.
February 1, 2021
Medellin‘s notoriously corrupt elite backed the city’s most powerful business giant after one of its foundations admitted it fraudulently sought a $2.8 million (COP10 billion) grant meant for poor children.
Mayor Daniel Quintero‘s attack against the so-called Antioquia Business Group (GEA) came after a failed attempt to remove the former anti-corruption advocate from power.
To make things worse for the unregistered business giant, its Clara Cristina foundation admitted to falsifying a municipal document that would grant the 60-year-old NGO a contract to provide school lunches to the city’s poor.
The reputation of the business conglomerate had already been going downhill after member businesses like Bancolombia and Cementos Argos were convicted for making a profit from Colombia’s armed conflict through land dispossession.
Colombia exceeds 50,000 COVID-19 deaths
January 21, 2021
The coronavirus killed more than 50,000 people in Colombia over the past year, the country’s Health Ministry said Thursday.
In its daily update, the Health Ministry reported 395 registered COVID-19 deaths over the past 24 hours, bringing the total on 50,187.
After months of relative calm, a surge in hospitalization have been saturating municipal healthcare systems since the middle of December in the country’s largest cities, which is driving up the daily number of deaths to levels of the first peak in August.
Daily COVID-19 deaths
The health ministry registered another 15,366 newly infected people, bringing the total number of infections since the beginning of the pandemic on 1,972,345 infections.
December 15, 2020
The Ramos Clan from Medellin may see two of its members go to prison over their alleged attempts to make the family patriarch’s narco ties go away through fraud and bribery.
According to the prosecution, Esteban Ramos bribed a prosecutor in an attempt to help his father, former Antioquia Governor Luis Alfredo Ramos, who allegedly bribed a Supreme Court magistrate to obstruct investigations into his alleged ties to the Medellin mafia.
While the family patriarch is awaiting sentencing over his alleged mafia ties, his son and daughter-in-law on Tuesday were charged with bribery as more than two decades of alleged criminal activity appears to be catching up.