https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/17/chile-second-covid-wave-hits-despite-vaccination-campaign
Since the second wave of the Corona virus has made its way around the world Chile has been hit very hard by it. With over ⅓ of the population vaccinated, the thought was the numbers of deaths would increasingly go down and life would seemingly go back to as close to normal as possible. However the complete opposite has begun to happen. The ICU of most hospitals is overflowing with people and the death toll is climbing higher and higher everyday. Approximately 5,000 new cases are reported daily, a lot of those new cases are coming from the metropolitan area. Santiago, which is the capital of Chile is responsible for around 44% of the new cases. Approximately a total of 21,000 Chilaians have died and over 900,000 people have been infected in Chile since the start of the pandemic. The Intensive Care Units are starting to report that the people over the age of 70 have virtually disappeared from the hospitals. Most of them have been vaccinated and the vaccine has worked exactly as planned so far. However that does mean that the people in the ICU are younger, and are gravely ill as well.
I think that the COVID pandemic has obviously taken over the world and stopped life as we knew it. However it has been a year and the light is starting to be visible at the end of the tunnel which is great, however it is far from over and it’s apparent in Chile. The most concerning thing for me is that the age demographic for people becoming ill enough to go to the hospital is that we haven’t seen that in the states, and I hope we don’t. However this also begins to beg the question of, how many new strands of covid are there and could this rise in younger people’s illness be one.
From an international relations standpoint, covid in itself has obviously had the most world effects of anything in history especially when it comes to the super power nations like the US, China, and Russia. However the smaller countries that are seeing even larger effects on scale are hurting tremendously. I think the main way to fight this as best as possible is to create more vaccines, that may be an obvious answer but it is going to take upwards of another year before 100% of the world is vaccinated. Countries like the US who have been in some serious pain can still sustain themselves however Chile is starting to look in the wrong direction if more vaccines aren’t available.