BUENOS AIRES, May 19 (Xinhua) -- Argentina's President Alberto Fernandez on Tuesday praised his country's two-month lockdown strategy for effectively containing the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).
"We Argentinians understood the risk and we had in each governor the leader needed to spur people to stay at home," Fernandez said during a tour of a Volkswagen plant in Tigre, a city on the outskirts of northern Greater Buenos Aires.
"In each union leader we had the exact leader to explain why it was necessary to self-isolate. In each mayor, the right person to have the people abide by all of this," Fernandez added.
Countries that were more flexible with their containment strategies must still deal with the same economic fallout as those that adopted stricter lockdown measures, he said, "because it's not just our problem, it's the world's problem, it's global."
Since economies were going to suffer the impact of the pandemic anyway, it was the right thing to do "to prioritize people's lives and health," said the president, indicating Argentina will take a cautious approach to resuming economic activity.
"We are going to continue to do that (protecting lives) because we care about the people as much as we care about economic development," he said.
The industrial hub Fernandez visited resumed operating on Monday, with the permission of national, regional and local authorities, and with social distancing measures in place, including 1,500 workers, or half the usual number, working on six-hour shifts.
Argentina, which declared a lockdown on March 20, has seen one of the smaller outbreaks in Latin America, with 8,371 cases of infection and 382 deaths by Monday.
The lockdown continues until May 24. Enditem
