Chile adds more than 4,000 cases for the fourth consecutive day and 42 deaths

With the 42 deaths registered in the last 24 hours, the death toll since March reached 17,477 and the total number of cases reached 669,832.

Santiago de Chile, Jan 17 (EFE) .- Chile, which has been mired in a second wave of the covid-19 pandemic for a month, surpassed this Sunday for the fourth consecutive day the barrier of 4,000 daily cases of the SARS coronavirus -CoV-2 by registering 4,340 new infected and adding 42 new deaths in the last 24 hours.
For seven weeks, and coinciding with the arrival of the summer season, the number of new infections has been increasing and the figures for the last week are similar to those registered during the months of June and July, when the country was on the edge of the sanitary collapse.
On the last day, a new record of 68,458 PCR tests was carried out, leaving a national positive rate of 6.34% and raising the total number of tests to more than 7.2 million since the arrival of the pandemic last March. .
As a preventive measure against the advance of the second wave, the authorities decreed a total quarantine in more than 40 neighborhoods of the country since last Thursday, a measure that affects more than 20% of the population and that it is not ruled out to implement the next week.
With the 42 deaths registered in the last 24 hours, the death toll since March reached 17,477 and the total number of cases reached 669,832.
In the last 24 hours, the Ministry of the Interior reported, the regions that added the most infections per 100,000 inhabitants were Los Lagos, to the south; the Magallanes region, the southernmost in the country, and Tarapacá, to the north.
This Sunday, the number of active cases, which means they can infect, reached 25,429, one of the highest figures since July.
Regarding the vaccination process, the authorities reported that more than 13,000 health workers in the regions most affected by the pandemic received at least one dose of Pfizer and more than 8,000 obtained the two doses necessary to ensure immunity.
Chile, which began immunization on December 24, aims to vaccinate the entire population at risk in the first quarter of 2021 and the rest in the first six months of the year.