A year ago, on February 29, 2020 (leap year), the former Minister of Health, Catalina Andramuño, announced the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the country. An Ecuadorian citizen who arrived in Guayaquil on February 14. Ecuador registers 286.155 infected now.
The pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, was advancing on other continents. In Latin America, Brazil and Mexico reported the first cases. In the country, in January 2020, masks and social distancing still did not mark people’s daily lives.
The first suspicion of contagion was a Chinese citizen who arrived in Quito. After several days of uncertainty, it was known that the result of his PCR test was negative. Days later he died of pneumonia.
On February 29, authorities announced the first confirmed case of COVID-19. The woman who arrived from a trip was in intensive care due to her aggravated state of health. The days progressed and Guayaquil began to have more confirmed cases, Los Ríos, Manabí, Pichincha and the rest of the provinces.
Today, February 28, 2021, the country registers 1.808 new infections, adding a total of 286.155 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with a positivity of more than 30%. Yesterday, February 27, Pichincha exceeded 100.000 infections and is the epicenter province of the pandemic, with two positive cases of the British variant.
Epidemiologists such as Andrea Gómez and Daniel Simancas warned that PCR tests, even after a year, are still scarce. For the analyst Carlos Oporto, the figures that were delivered in the first months of the pandemic (March, April and May) do not correspond to the reality that the country was experiencing, precisely, due to the lack of epidemiological surveillance and testing at the national level. 12 months later, the country has just reached one million PCR tests applied in the country.
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