Chile Charts New Path With Rolling Lockdowns, Immunity Cards

(Bloomberg) --

Santiago’s central square looks a little like India this week, with police and army units enforcing a tight lockdown -- no one moves without a permit. Down the street, it feels more like Sweden with its soft approach to the pandemic -- the produce market there is thronged with shoppers and many stores are open.

Chile, South America’s richest country, is still a developing nation with 30% of its workforce in the informal economy and it’s forging a unique battle plan that has -- so far, anyway -- proved successful.

It has a system of rolling obligatory quarantines based on a formula combining an area’s new cases per capita, the size of its elderly population and access to health care. And it has created “immunity passes” that it will start issuing next week for those who’ve recovered from Covid-19, allowing them back into the workforce.

The goal, health officials say, is not to eradicate coronavirus but to contain it, enabling hospitals to cope.

Thus far, there have been just 160 recorded deaths in a nation of 18 million. There were 464 new infections announced Wednesday, compared with a peak of 534 on April 16, bringing the total to 11,296. Like everywhere, the true counts are probably higher.

While the number of reported cases across Latin America has been low, the official data of most countries in the region are unreliable, as has been seen with bodies in the street in southern Ecuador defying government figures.

Testing

Chile has tested a higher percentage of its residents than any other Latin American nation, suggesting that its numbers can be viewed with greater confidence. It’s similar in some ways to South Korea, which also closed and opened its country in sections, but Chile has far less testing capacity and isn’t tracking the infected on mobile phones.

“We expect a non-exponential increase in cases, which is why we tighten and let go of” restrictions in some neighborhoods, said Paula Daza, Health undersecretary in a recent interview with La Tercera.

Still, the crisis is in its early stages and some experts think Chile has been mostly lucky to have escaped a higher infection rate.

The virus has spread out of the wealthy areas where it first appeared as people returned from summer holidays in Europe, and into the so-called vertical ghettos of high-rise blocks in central Santiago and poorer regional cities. Chile started mass testing the population in the narrow alleys of one area of south Santiago this week after a spike in cases.

“We are doing well, so far, but it’s too soon to declare victory,” said Paula Bedregal, a public health expert and professor at the medical school of Universidad Catolica de Chile. “We aren’t in winter yet, when things can get more complicated, and the virus is starting to appear more among more vulnerable groups.”

Bedregal added that real information is lacking in some of the poorest areas, making it harder to know if the system in place will continue to succeed.

The country’s approach can be seen in the wealthy Santiago districts of Vitacura and Las Condes. As soon as the quarantine was lifted in Vitacura on April 13, life returned to relative normality. Building sites reopened, hairdressers advertised their services and an army of maids and gardeners returned to work.

Down the road in Las Condes, the police and military were stopping cars and checking if drivers had obtained their permits and why they were out on the street. Building sites remained closed and public transport was being diverted away. The lockdown there remained in place for one more week.

Chile’s Chamber of Commerce has drawn up guidelines for restarting shopping malls, with one in the town of Quilpue briefly opening its doors this week. Police and naval officers shepherded long lines of people waiting to get in on Monday before local authorities forced its closing again.

The government’s plan to start issuing immunity passports for people who have recovered will be based partly on antibody tests. This has produced two concerns. One is that the tests have proved unreliable elsewhere. The second is that some people may get deliberately ill in order to obtain the immunity card.

The U.S. and others have nonetheless said they’re looking into the option themselves.

Some Chileans say that, despite all the serious work, testing hasn’t kept pace with the spread of the virus and too little is known to pass judgment on the government’s approach.

“It’s premature to say if the dynamic quarantines have been successful,” said Marcela Garrido, head of the Department of Public Health and Epidemiology at the Universidad Los Andes in Santiago. “When you analyze at the municipal level or sectors, we can see different evolutions of Covid-19, some of which haven’t been so favorable.”

The government may discover it has to end up following the path of other countries, such as Italy and Spain, which imposed country-wide lockdowns after finding that limited quarantines hadn’t worked, Miguel Kiwi and Rafael Gonzalez, science professors at Universidad de Chile and Universidad Mayor, wrote in Ciper, a website, last week.

The government said the system of rolling quarantines will be in place for months, until at least after the end of the southern hemisphere’s winter.

“We’re thinking of a country without quarantines not before August or September,” Health Minister Jaime Manalich said in a recent interview with Canal 13.

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