Author Name: Carribean Channel, Cuba TV.
This story was originally published on canalcaribe.ict.cu. [1]

Are there countries without Covid-19?
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On a daily basis, the World Health Organization and other internationally prestigious institutions, mostly academic, count in practically real time, the nations infected with the new coronavirus, as well as those with transmission of the Covid-19 disease, and in more detail, the numbers of infected and deaths. The rapid spread of this pandemic raises a question: are there still countries free from this nightmare?

Before answering categorically if there are States without Covid-19, it must be taken into account that the start dates of each of the outbreaks, the number of patients, the deceased, and the level of spread of the virus throughout the planet are Data that , regardless of the controversy that many have generated, will always be inaccurate in the midst of the chaos that the pandemic has unleashed. Such inaccuracy in some cases has to do with the bad will of governments that try to hide their incapacity in handling the emergency, and become experts at hiding numbers; and in other territories, there is neither the sanitary structure nor the minimum material or human resources to even account for the ravages of the virus.

Thus, when Haiti could count the cases with one hand, according to official figures, in Cuba there were people who reported having been infected in Port-au-Prince, to give just one example. Too much chance that the Cuban had been the contact of one of those infected “numbered” Haitians? It happens that, as long as an individual cannot confirm his infection through the rigorous medical analysis, it does not become a statistic, so most of the times the numbers and reality do not agree.

Therefore, instead of talking about Covid-19 free countries, it is more accurate to say that there are countries without official reports of the disease. For the time being, a fortnight, data that may also be out of date at this very minute, because the spread is ever faster and, as has been repeated to exhaustion, it does not understand physical, political or socioeconomic borders. None of the blessed for now belongs to the Western Hemisphere, since on the American continent Covid-19 has a presence in all its independent and associated territories.

From the list there are some more known than others, but 10 of them are islets —or group of islets and atolls— of short territorial extension that look like points on the world map; very little inhabited, in the smallest, lives a number of people similar to that of the tourist town of Viñales, in Cuba. They are located geographically distant from the cities with high rates of incidence and transmissibility of the infection. In turn, they are nations with little influx of international visitors, which, until yesterday meant economic weakness, today has been the greatest strength to stay isolated from the health tragedy. These Pacific islands: Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Nauru, Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga, Solomon Islands are almost a rarity for many citizens. For Cubans they are less unknown because in some of them there is the presence of medical brigades sent by Havana, and others such as Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands have become a decisive letter year after year, during the UN vote against the US blockade.

(C) Cuba TV, Cuban state owned media.
[1] Url: https://www.canalcaribe.icrt.cu/en/are-there-countries-without-covid-19/