Argentina enacts nationwide lockdown, economic stimulus in response to Covid-19 crisis
Argentine President Alberto Fernández announced today that a nationwide lockdown is being enacted, effective midnight tonight.
Most commercial, financial, religious, and tourist establishments are ordered closed until March 31st, as well as a home isolation order for the nation's 45 million people.
Permits will be issued on a need basis, and essential staff and services such as grocery stores, media and health care are exempted.
"If we stay home, there will be less contagion and we will suffer much less," Fernández explained. "We still have many days in which to take care of ourselves, and a battle to fight."
The emergency measure is in response to the ongoing Covid-19 global pandemic, which in Argentina has already reached 128 known cases since March 1st and claimed three lives.
Today's announcement follows a March 15 executive order suspending all public events with audiences or spectators - as well as shutting schools, national parks, and international borders.
A 14-day quarantine had been ordered on March 12 for Argentine residents recently arrived from "high-risk" countries - the source for virtually all the 128 cases known thus far.
These emergency measures are expected to deepen the country's recession - already approaching its third year.
Accordingly, Production Minister Matías Kulfas on March 17 announced price controls and a $7.5 billion stimulus package - including a $5.5 billion credit line for employers, a 3,000-peso ($46) monthly bonus for all retirees and family assistance beneficiaries (some 9 million people between them), and a $1.5 billion public works program.
"Health is not a building"
The public works package includes the construction of 8 modular hospitals to deal with an expected increase of respiratory ailments due to Covid-19, as well as the completion of two general hospitals outside Buenos Aires.
The two hospitals had been built during former President Cristina Kirchner's second term (2011-15), and were to serve La Matanza County - a largely working-class county west of Buenos Aires whose 1.8 million people were among the most underserved in the nation.
But just months from their planned inaugural in 2016, Kirchner's right-wing successor, Mauricio Macri, suspended funding for these hospitals - leaving one empty, and the other functioning as a primary clinic.
When asked about the suspended works on these and five other such facilities in 2017, then-Governor María Vidal replied that "health is not a building."
Macri and Vidal were defeated for re-election last October.
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=wT&sl=es&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telam.com.ar%2Fnotas%2F202003%2F442323-fernandez-olivo-reunion-gobernadores-coronavirus.html
Argentine President Alberto Fernández (right) and Public Works Minister Gabriel Katopodis fly over the Dr. René Favaloro Hospital, west of Buenos Aires.
The hospital, inaugurated in 2015, functioned only as a primary clinic due to recurrent budget cuts under Fernández's right-wing predecessor.
A March 17 executive order frees funds for this and another - but still-vacant - hospital nearby, and eight modular hospitals.
Today's nationwide lockdown - based on similar measures enacted in China, Italy, and Spain - will inevitably deepen the nation's two year-old recession.
