The tiredness that María felt last Wednesday did not bode well, although, at first, she thought it had been the walk under the sun throughout Central Havana in search of bread. Later, her discomfort made her fear the worst of her, of which she had no doubts the next day, when she woke up with a fever of 38: she had dengue.
The woman, however, refuses to be confirmed by a doctor. “I take a lot of fluids, vitamins and paracetamol for the fever,” she tells this newspaper. “If you go to the doctor they don’t give you anything either.” María remembers that the last time she suffered from the disease, 12 years ago, when she was visiting relatives in the province, “they almost brought me to the police because I refused to go to the hospital.”
At that time, he points out, they hospitalized people to avoid contagion. Now, he ventures, alluding to his central Havana neighborhood, “this must be riddled with dengue, because today they were fumigating the streets early and they never do that here.”
“If everyone who gets sick went to the doctor, the official figures would be much higher, but a good part of the population is afraid of being admitted, and they don’t go,” he publishes this Monday. the official press citing a patient from Pinar del Río.
“I take a lot of fluids, vitamins and paracetamol for fever,” he tells this newspaper. “If you go to the doctor they don’t give you anything either”
In the same article, the director of the Provincial Center for Hygiene, Epidemiology and Microbiology of that province, Andrés Villar, offers the figure of 1,457 mosquito outbreaks Aedes aegypti only in the area of Vueltabajo. Nevertheless, Granma It does not go beyond qualifying the situation as a “complicated scenario”.
In Ciego de Ávila, the newspaper Invasive echoes that the infection rate in the provincial capital, 0.43 –compared to the permissible 0.05– “turns on the alarms”.
Yordanka Hernández Rodríguez, deputy director of Epidemiology at the Municipal Hygiene Unit, reported that last week, of 114 samples analyzed in Ciego de Ávila, 48 were positive.
The Ministry of Public Health, for its part, has not issued any alert note or figures that encompass the entire country. its owner, Jose Angel Portal Mirandaappealed to “individual and family self-responsibility” in the face of the spread of the virus.
The minister also warned that patients can progress to gravity “very precipitously” and asked to go “immediately” to medical services “at the slightest sign of alarm that may appear, especially between the third and seventh day of the first symptoms, such as repeated vomiting, edema or swelling, severe abdominal pain, irritability, drowsiness and bleeding.
This Sunday, on the fourth day of her first symptoms, the fine rash characteristic of the disease appeared on María’s extremities. She no longer has a fever, but she prays that it does not complicate severe dengue, hemorrhagic fever, the only case in which she would go to a doctor: “If I go, I only help them with the statistics; they are not going to help me” .
________________________
Collaborate with our work:
The team of 14ymedio is committed to doing serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time becoming a member of our journal. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
