"If I don't know who is infected, I'm never going to be able to combat this" pandemic, Rafael Surillo, mayor of Yabucoa, says.
Mayors of towns across Puerto Rico are facing uncertainty as they grapple with the fallout of a botched effort from the island's government to purchase at least 1 million coronavirus testing kits, worth $38 million, at a time when the U.S. territory has the lowest per-capita testing rate compared with any state.
Rafael Surillo, mayor of the eastern coastal town of Yabucoa, said he has"not received a call from the Health Department, not even to ask me, 'Hey mayor, how are things over there?'" Surillo said he recruited local medical professionals and health care workers to create"our own local protocol" to monitor coronavirus cases and run some tests with the help of a community lab.
Story continuesPuerto Rico has over 1,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus and at least 58 deaths, with nearly 1,500 test results pending. About 10,400 tests have been done on an island of 3.2 million people, representing less than 1 percent of the population. Ponce Mayor María Meléndez has been meeting daily with the members of a task force she put together last month to monitor the spread of the coronavirus and tailor their response protocol.
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