While the most recent package of measures to reinforce epidemiological control is already being applied in the capital of the eastern Cuban province of Las Tunas, its authorities are not neglecting the logistical assurance for the distribution of food and other basic services.

Las Tunas, Cuba.- With only a couple of days left to March, the province has an incidence rate of 20.8 cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 inhabitants in the last 15 days. Las Tunas and Majibacoa are the municipalities with the worst situation, right now.

The territorial capital has diagnosed a hundred positives to SARS-CoV-2 as a result of autochthonous transmission in the last two weeks, for which, on Monday, new restrictions on public transport to and from that area came into effect here; also the face-to-face activities of the school year in General Education were paralyzed.

In Majibacoa, 12 new cases have already been detected in the last 15 days, especially in the local sugar mill. In fact, that municipality saw its incidence rate per 100,000 inhabitants climb in the same period to 29.1, above the provincial average.

However, no new cases were diagnosed on Sunday, although 287 samples for real-time PCR tests were studied, of which a part was evaluated by the molecular biology laboratory of the Pedro Kourí Tropical Medicine Institute, in Havana, Dr. Gregory Pérez Héctor, provincial deputy director of Health, informed. Many of those samples came from suspected patients or confirmed case contacts, he added.

"Our strength must continue to be that each new positive is found among those in the isolation centers," Manuel Pérez Gallego, first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party in the province, said.

Also in their daily meeting with executives of companies and institutions in the territory, the main party and government authorities here indicated that, without neglecting what is indicated to confront the pandemic, it is a priority to guarantee the distribution of the basic food basket, and other essential services and tasks of high value for the national economy like the sugar harvest.

In this regard, 13 private owners will join this week in the transfer of products made by the Food Industry, as wheat flour and noodles. It is, said officials of the organization, part of the effort to fill the serious fuel deficits that the nation suffers from the tightening of the U.S. blockade. This shortage becomes more critical in the last days of each month.