Mayor of Venezuela marks houses of people with COVID-19

The Venezuelan Attorney General’s Office announced on Wednesday the opening of a criminal investigation against an official mayor of the central state of Yaracuy that marked the homes of people infected with the coronavirus or suspected of being so.

The Public Ministry opened a “criminal investigation of Mayor Luis Adrián Duque de Yaracuy, who unilaterally and outside the policy of the Venezuelan State to combat the pandemic: macabrely marked the homes of patients suffering from Covid19,” said Attorney General Tarek William Saab on Twitter. He headed his writing with the label “segregation.”

The Prosecutor’s Office, “together with the Ombudsman’s Office, acted jointly to proceed to remove the unusual notices selectively placed in Yaracuy today in the homes of said patients,” Saab added in another tweet, without giving further details.

The legal action was taken after the mayor released a video on his Instagram account where he realized that he was putting up posters to alert neighbors of the alleged presence of people with SARS-CoV-2 in the area, which unleashed a broadside of criticism on social networks.

“We are protecting our people. Here it indicates when we have a COVID case or a suspected case. This is what it indicates, so that our people are alert, “said Duque, with his back to a poster where you could read inside a red circle with the forbidden sign:” Family in preventive quarantine (visits are not accepted). “

In Venezuela – where the coronavirus has not hit as hard as in other South American countries and which in recent weeks has experienced a rebound – there are more than 170,100 positive cases and 1,705 deaths since the first two cases were detected on March 13 2020.