Meet The Protesters Who Want More Testing

Citizens are fed up as Puerto Rico tests for the coronavirus at a far lower rate than the rest of the U.S. A cacophony of honking and chants erupted Wednesday morning outside the Puerto Rico Health Department headquarters in San Juan.

But unlike the pleas spreading across the U.S. to reopen the economy, these protesters, all of whom demonstrated from the confines of their cars, had an altogether different demand: to perform more tests to diagnose the novel coronavirus.

This piquete servicarro — drive-through protest — was organized by three groups: the feminist organization Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, the anti-debt group Jornada: Se Acabaron las Promesas, and the food distribution initiative Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico. “The incompetent handling of these cases by the Health Department impacts the government’s ability to implement public policy,” Shariana Ferrer-Nuñez, a spokesperson for Colectiva, said. “We’re using misleading information from the department to say the outbreak is being contained and we could reactivate our economic activity. It’s dangerous.”

“The government has zero credibility when it comes to handling an emergency.”

The first drive-through protest took place on April 15 — exactly one month after Gov. Wanda Vázquez ordered the island to go into lockdown in order to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The restrictions, some of the strictest in the U.S., have prevented Puerto Rico’s fragile health care system from growing overwhelmed. Still, citizens have been frustrated with the slow rate of testing.

The U.S. territory has a population of 3.2 million people. On average, there have been about 15 coronavirus tests performed a day for every 100,000 people, according to the Covid Tracking Project — a rate far below any state in the U.S.

There have been nearly 12,200 tests performed on the island so far, according to the Puerto Rico Health Department. However, even the low figure was an overcount. Up until Tuesday, someone who tested positive for the virus would have been counted twice: once because they took a finger-prick blood test, and a second time because they underwent a nasal-swab test for confirmation. The Health Department amended the number of positive cases then.

“The government has zero credibility when it comes to handling an emergency,” Ferrer-Nuñez said. “We saw it after Hurricane Maria. We saw it after the earthquakes from earlier this year. And now we’re seeing it with the coronavirus crisis.”

Gov. Vázquez announced last week her administration had canceled contracts for 1 million Covid-19 tests worth nearly $38 million. The government had paid a $19 million deposit to Apex General Constructors, a local construction firm with no medical experience, to acquire the tests from an Australian manufacturer specialized in medical devices. But they never arrived, and now the contracts are currently under local and federal investigations. The local government also distributed about 100,000 out of the 200,000 rapid-testing kits to hospitals, nursing homes, and the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport. But Secretary of Health Lorenzo González-Feliciano said over the weekend they have yet to be utilized and he did not know the reason. GEN reached out to the Puerto Rico Health Department about these claims, but a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The grassroots push for more testing in Puerto Rico is almost in direct opposition to the anti-social distancing rallies that have taken place in several states. Those protests, which call for the end of the quarantine despite the advice of public health experts, have been engineered through social media by a well-funded network of conservative activists.

Boricuas are creative protestors — we saw this during the protests that led to the ouster of former Gov. Ricardo Rosselló in 2019 — so the piquete servicarro is not the only mechanism they have used to rally for more testing.

The act of cacerolazos — beating pots and pans at a certain hour, which was popular during the anti-Rosselló protests — has also made a comeback. Singer-songwriter Melissa Ocasio has been sheltering with her parents in the mountain town of Gurabo, and every day at 8 p.m. she grabs her cacerola and broadcasts on Instagram Live. “This month in lockdown has been a lost month because we have not adequately tested for cases nor have we handled the contact tracing correctly. The government has also not been transparent,” she said. “[In these protests] I’m channeling my frustration and anger.”

The distrust in the Vázquez administration’s data stems from the death toll after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017. For nearly a year, the government said only 64 people had died as a consequence of the storm. The real death toll, which was eventually revised, was closer to 3,000.

Representatives from several corporations in Puerto Rico are already asking to reopen their businesses due to the current statistics. Ferrer-Nuñez pushed back against that notion, saying that without proper testing and contact tracing taking those steps would mean a death sentence for many Boricuas. As of Wednesday, there had been 915 positive cases and 67 deaths.

“We just want to get out of this pandemic,” she said, “healthy and safe.”

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