Pandemic spreading 'with enormous ferocity' in Argentina's interior, warns president

BUENOS AIRES - The COVID-19 pandemic is spreading "with enormous ferocity" in the interior of Argentina, President Alberto Fernandez warned on Sunday.

"Between now and the end of the year we have to contain it, because the pandemic is not over, it is at its worst at the moment. We are experiencing it with a little more relief in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. But in the interior (of the country) it has spread with enormous ferocity," Fernandez said in an interview published Sunday by local online news magazine El Cohete a la Luna.

"The pandemic has disrupted the economy around the world. We are also suffering from it and by the end of the year we will have a clearer picture for tackling it in 2021," he said.

In the central province of Buenos Aires, the largest in the country, the number of intensive care beds has grown from 790 in December to nearly 2,100, according to the president.

"At the peak (of the outbreak), around 1,500 beds were occupied," he said.

The federal government supplied more than 3,000 intensive care beds throughout the country, adding to what regional and local leaders provided, said Fernandez.

Argentina registered its first case of COVID-19 on March 3. It has reported more than 883,000 cases of infection and over 23,000 deaths from the disease.