Argentina battles health and economic crises as COVID cases soar

Hospital units are overflowing as exhausted healthcare workers plead with the public to heed warnings of distancing and to take precautions. In the province of Buenos Aires, the government has started producing its own oxygen to confront a looming shortage. Vaccine shipments are arriving, but as with many countries in Latin America, the campaign was slow to get going amid fierce global competition. Some 20 percent of the population have received their first shot. “The system is collapsing,” Dr Emmanuel Alvarez wrote in an open letter last month he titled “a desperate shout from the conurbano”, the ring of densely populated and mostly working-class municipalities around the capital.