SANTIAGO – For the first time, the Health Ministry has published the deaths per municipality in Chile. No surprise, the Metropolitan Region has the highest number of registered Covid-19 deaths. The quarantine measures, implemented a month ago in the region, are not yet showing any effects.
One of the main critiques from local authorities during the pandemic was that the national government refused to release more precise reports on where the infected and dead were concentrated. This way, the Health Ministry was obstructing a more specific way of tackling the virus, several mayors argued. On Sunday, June 14, maybe not so coincidentally the first official workday of new Health Minister Enrique Paris, the ministry released for the first time a report with the deaths per municipality listed.
The Metropolitan Region is, according to the report, seeing the highest number of deaths: 29 of the 30 municipalities with the most deaths are all located in this densely populated part of Chile. The report also shows that the only municipalities with more than 100 deaths are all located in the Metropolitan Region:
- La Florida (157 deaths)
- Puente Alto (156)
- Maipú (113)
- Independencia (111)
- Recoleta (106)
- Santiago (105)
The municipalities with the highest death rate, which is calculated in deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, are also all located in the Metropolitan Region:
- San Ramón (82.1)
- Independencia (78.1)
- San José de Maipo (75.1)
Today, June 15, is also exactly one month since Santiago and several surrounding municipalities entered a quarantine. According to the latest report, numbers have continued to climb in the region during that month. On May 15, there were 29,276 Covid-19 cases in the region. A month later, this number grew by nearly 380 percent to 140,398 cases.
Death numbers are following the same trend. When the region started its quarantine, there were 221 deaths according to official numbers. Yesterday, there were 2,878 deaths in the region: an increase of more than 1,200 percent.
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Editor-In-Chief Boris van der Spek is the founder of Chile Today.