Shiloh
Editor, Senior Moderator
Source: https://100noticias.com.ni/nacionales/100867-nicaragua-como-se-organizo-una-red-paralela-para-t/
Nicaragua: how a parallel network was organized to try to find out the real death toll from the coronavirus that is hiding the Daniel Ortega regime
A team of health workers, computer scientists and specialists in various areas makes a survey that has recorded 88 deaths in the country so far with symptoms associated with the coronavirus. The government only recognizes five officially.
Fabi?n Medina Infobae
They call themselves the "Citizen Observatory COVID-19 in Nicaragua" and it is an underground network of experts and volunteers who carry out a parallel count on the cases of the coronavirus in Nicaragua, given the lack of credibility that the government reports have.
At ten in the morning, for two months, the Secretary General of the Ministry of Health (Minsa), Dr. Carlos S?enz, stands in front of television cameras to read a report that says less and less. It began by reporting confirmed cases, deceased cases, tests carried out and suspects, and day after day it was removing details, leaving in the latest reports only the “active cases” and the suspects they recognize. This week, even, the Minsa stopped publishing the daily report, for the first time since the pandemic began.
Official reports avoid categories commonly used by the World Health Organization (WHO) such as "confirmed cases", "tests performed", "deceased" or "recovered" to establish their own in confusing and religious language that experts in epidemiology they have criticized as “imprecise” and of “little credibility”. They speak of "active cases", "delicate and cared for", "delicate, but stable" or "people in responsible and careful monitoring", among others.
“As of today, there are 16 people in responsible and careful monitoring. We have no local community broadcast. We continue working, in the prevention and care of people, in the name of God! ”, Says the statement of the Minsa of last April 29.
The last report of the Minsa was released this past Tuesday. The Daniel Ortega regime recognizes four "active cases" and from the addition and subtraction in their data it follows that they accept 16 confirmed cases and five of them deceased.
These data radically contrast with those presented this Friday by the Citizen Observatory, which registers 781 cases related to COVID-19, an amount 48 times higher than the official one. The network of specialists distributes the cases as follows: "16 confirmed by the Minsa plus 16 suspects from the Minsa plus another 748 suspects from the Observatory."
It also records that “88 accumulated deaths related to pneumonia and suspects have taken place in 13 departments and 30 municipalities. Managua (32) and Chinandega (18) report the highest number of deaths ”. Those deaths multiplied by 17 the official number reported by the government.
The Observatory indicates in its latest report that “as of May 6, 87 health persons (workers) with associated or presumptive symptoms of COVID-19 are reported. Of these 87 people, 33 report having been tested (19 positive, 8 do not know or do not know the result, 4 indeterminate results and 2 negative).
"We are an interdisciplinary team. There are health professionals, but also from other branches such as computer science, communication, engineering, political science and human rights. All these visions and tools have been put at the service of the Observatory's work to generate the analyzes, ”says one of the specialists who agreed to speak with Infobae on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the regime.
"We formed it as a spontaneous citizen initiative in the face of the misinformation that exists in the country regarding the advance of the pandemic. We found it important to rescue the role of the citizenry in supervising and organizing for self-protection, "says the source.
The Observatory claims to have a network of informants in more than 50 municipalities of the 153 that Nicaragua has. “However, for security reasons, we cannot provide more information on these informants and their working mechanism because the Observatory has already received three different attacks by people related to the government,” added the specialist.
Precautions are not free. A Minsa press release, published on March 10, warned that only information about the pandemic that comes from that official source will be taken as true. "We warn our people and people of other nationalities who visit or live in our country, that only the Ministry of Health, through a face-to-face Press Conference, can issue real announcements or information on this subject. Any other form is, without a doubt, false news ”, he pointed out.
And he adds: "We remind those who seek to spread fear among Nicaraguans and resident brothers, which constitutes a serious offense and also an expression of bad faith and ill will, to use social networks to misinform, circulating falsehoods on such a serious issue for the world and for Nicaraguans ”.
Read Also: Regime continues to promote crowding, despite the increase in cases of coronavirus
"Our information is not intended to be an official report because we know that this citizen effort needs to be complemented by other actions," says the Observatory source, who acknowledges that his main weakness is the impossibility of making or having access to the COVID-19 tests.
The Ministry of Health has centralized the acquisition and application of tests for the diagnosis of this coronavirus. No private hospital is authorized to acquire or perform COVID-19 tests. In any suspicious case, these hospitals must send the sample to the state institution for examination. In early April, Nicaragua received a batch of 26,000 COVID-19 tests from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), without knowing until now how many and how they have been applied.
So how does the Observatory get to the numbers it publishes each week?
"We are developing what in medical theory is known as Community Epidemiological Surveillance that has five sources of information," explains the source. "We mainly work on what the theory knows as" rumor "that is based on key informants in different territories that indicate relevant situations. The rumor theory says that for information to become a rumor, it must be relevant to that territory and have an alert value, especially when there is disinformation and secrecy on the part of the State. ”
“From the Observatory we systematize all the information we receive, including things that circulate on social networks. However, it is through the network of key informants and certain triangulations that we consider the information verified. And we only publish and analyze the information categorized as 'verified', ”he says.
Dr. ?lvaro Ram?rez, a renowned Nicaraguan epidemiologist residing in Ireland, closely follows the development of the pandemic in his country. In fact, he was one of the first to ring the alarm bells in the face of the recklessness with which the Daniel Ortega regime assumed the threat of COVID-19.
"Nicaragua is not doing things well," he said since last March when the Nicaraguan government, instead of promoting social distancing and prevention, organized acts of mass conglomeration and dismissed the use of masks, quarantines, and border closures. "We are going to see people falling with pneumonia on the streets and crowded hospitals," he predicted.
"It is already being seen that the number of cases is increasing in all the hospitals in the country," he says now. “There are rumors and information on the increase in cases. This is every day. And since the growth is exponential, the cases are going to multiply every seven days. This will continue to rise as long as serious measures are not taken in Nicaragua and control is established. And even if measures were taken, at this point all the people who have been infected for two or three weeks are going to continue attending hospitals and hospitals are going to become the major sources of contamination. ”
Ram?rez considers that "in the absence of official information from the Ministry of Health", the information collected and published by the Citizen Observatory "closely resembles the reports that there are of the number of cases at the Central American level, in the different countries, without However, it does not have the COVID confirmatory tests, but they help to understand where the rumor is and where the cases are occurring more strongly. ”
Nicaragua: how a parallel network was organized to try to find out the real death toll from the coronavirus that is hiding the Daniel Ortega regime
A team of health workers, computer scientists and specialists in various areas makes a survey that has recorded 88 deaths in the country so far with symptoms associated with the coronavirus. The government only recognizes five officially.
Fabi?n Medina Infobae
They call themselves the "Citizen Observatory COVID-19 in Nicaragua" and it is an underground network of experts and volunteers who carry out a parallel count on the cases of the coronavirus in Nicaragua, given the lack of credibility that the government reports have.
At ten in the morning, for two months, the Secretary General of the Ministry of Health (Minsa), Dr. Carlos S?enz, stands in front of television cameras to read a report that says less and less. It began by reporting confirmed cases, deceased cases, tests carried out and suspects, and day after day it was removing details, leaving in the latest reports only the “active cases” and the suspects they recognize. This week, even, the Minsa stopped publishing the daily report, for the first time since the pandemic began.
Official reports avoid categories commonly used by the World Health Organization (WHO) such as "confirmed cases", "tests performed", "deceased" or "recovered" to establish their own in confusing and religious language that experts in epidemiology they have criticized as “imprecise” and of “little credibility”. They speak of "active cases", "delicate and cared for", "delicate, but stable" or "people in responsible and careful monitoring", among others.
“As of today, there are 16 people in responsible and careful monitoring. We have no local community broadcast. We continue working, in the prevention and care of people, in the name of God! ”, Says the statement of the Minsa of last April 29.
The last report of the Minsa was released this past Tuesday. The Daniel Ortega regime recognizes four "active cases" and from the addition and subtraction in their data it follows that they accept 16 confirmed cases and five of them deceased.
These data radically contrast with those presented this Friday by the Citizen Observatory, which registers 781 cases related to COVID-19, an amount 48 times higher than the official one. The network of specialists distributes the cases as follows: "16 confirmed by the Minsa plus 16 suspects from the Minsa plus another 748 suspects from the Observatory."
It also records that “88 accumulated deaths related to pneumonia and suspects have taken place in 13 departments and 30 municipalities. Managua (32) and Chinandega (18) report the highest number of deaths ”. Those deaths multiplied by 17 the official number reported by the government.
The Observatory indicates in its latest report that “as of May 6, 87 health persons (workers) with associated or presumptive symptoms of COVID-19 are reported. Of these 87 people, 33 report having been tested (19 positive, 8 do not know or do not know the result, 4 indeterminate results and 2 negative).
"We are an interdisciplinary team. There are health professionals, but also from other branches such as computer science, communication, engineering, political science and human rights. All these visions and tools have been put at the service of the Observatory's work to generate the analyzes, ”says one of the specialists who agreed to speak with Infobae on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the regime.
"We formed it as a spontaneous citizen initiative in the face of the misinformation that exists in the country regarding the advance of the pandemic. We found it important to rescue the role of the citizenry in supervising and organizing for self-protection, "says the source.
The Observatory claims to have a network of informants in more than 50 municipalities of the 153 that Nicaragua has. “However, for security reasons, we cannot provide more information on these informants and their working mechanism because the Observatory has already received three different attacks by people related to the government,” added the specialist.
Precautions are not free. A Minsa press release, published on March 10, warned that only information about the pandemic that comes from that official source will be taken as true. "We warn our people and people of other nationalities who visit or live in our country, that only the Ministry of Health, through a face-to-face Press Conference, can issue real announcements or information on this subject. Any other form is, without a doubt, false news ”, he pointed out.
And he adds: "We remind those who seek to spread fear among Nicaraguans and resident brothers, which constitutes a serious offense and also an expression of bad faith and ill will, to use social networks to misinform, circulating falsehoods on such a serious issue for the world and for Nicaraguans ”.
Read Also: Regime continues to promote crowding, despite the increase in cases of coronavirus
"Our information is not intended to be an official report because we know that this citizen effort needs to be complemented by other actions," says the Observatory source, who acknowledges that his main weakness is the impossibility of making or having access to the COVID-19 tests.
The Ministry of Health has centralized the acquisition and application of tests for the diagnosis of this coronavirus. No private hospital is authorized to acquire or perform COVID-19 tests. In any suspicious case, these hospitals must send the sample to the state institution for examination. In early April, Nicaragua received a batch of 26,000 COVID-19 tests from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), without knowing until now how many and how they have been applied.
So how does the Observatory get to the numbers it publishes each week?
"We are developing what in medical theory is known as Community Epidemiological Surveillance that has five sources of information," explains the source. "We mainly work on what the theory knows as" rumor "that is based on key informants in different territories that indicate relevant situations. The rumor theory says that for information to become a rumor, it must be relevant to that territory and have an alert value, especially when there is disinformation and secrecy on the part of the State. ”
“From the Observatory we systematize all the information we receive, including things that circulate on social networks. However, it is through the network of key informants and certain triangulations that we consider the information verified. And we only publish and analyze the information categorized as 'verified', ”he says.
Dr. ?lvaro Ram?rez, a renowned Nicaraguan epidemiologist residing in Ireland, closely follows the development of the pandemic in his country. In fact, he was one of the first to ring the alarm bells in the face of the recklessness with which the Daniel Ortega regime assumed the threat of COVID-19.
"Nicaragua is not doing things well," he said since last March when the Nicaraguan government, instead of promoting social distancing and prevention, organized acts of mass conglomeration and dismissed the use of masks, quarantines, and border closures. "We are going to see people falling with pneumonia on the streets and crowded hospitals," he predicted.
"It is already being seen that the number of cases is increasing in all the hospitals in the country," he says now. “There are rumors and information on the increase in cases. This is every day. And since the growth is exponential, the cases are going to multiply every seven days. This will continue to rise as long as serious measures are not taken in Nicaragua and control is established. And even if measures were taken, at this point all the people who have been infected for two or three weeks are going to continue attending hospitals and hospitals are going to become the major sources of contamination. ”
Ram?rez considers that "in the absence of official information from the Ministry of Health", the information collected and published by the Citizen Observatory "closely resembles the reports that there are of the number of cases at the Central American level, in the different countries, without However, it does not have the COVID confirmatory tests, but they help to understand where the rumor is and where the cases are occurring more strongly. ”
