The Ministry of Public Health (MSP) has developed a new format for its COVID-19 Infographics that is supposed to be published daily through official channels.

In this new format it has changed the way it records deaths from COVID-19, it has eliminated the number of stable hospitalized patients with a reserved prognosis, it has changed the way it records hospitalized COVID-19 patients and has added a figure for the percentage of patients hospitalized in the country for any reason.

These changes were supposedly made with the purpose of making the information transparent and providing data of interest to the public, in addition to raising awareness about the severity of COVID-19, to reduce severe morbidity and mortality in the population.

Unfortunately, the MSP stopped releasing figures in the old format on July 23rd (with no prior warning) and launched the new system on July 24th.

This system then crashed on July 26th and no data was available at press time, so we are unable to provide a COVID-19 report this week.

It is our hope that this constant modification, adjustment, and lack of updating of the COVID-19 figures is finally finished and that the government will again begin to reliably release data on a daily basis.

Vaccinations

There is a new report from the government that outlines the number of vaccinations that have been given in Ecuador. That can be found at here.

The highlights of that report are (as of July 24th when it was last updated):

• 1,325,963 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been given
• 2,766,396 doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been given
• 5,585,521 doses of the Sinovac vaccine have been given
• 7,648,949 1st does of any vaccine have been given
• 2,028,931 2nd doses of any vaccine have been given
• 9,677,880 total doses of any vaccine have been given
• Herd immunity is expected at 12,692,163 people completely vaccinated (71.5% of the population).