‘Mysterious’ pneumonia spreads in Argentina, killing three people. Second round?

Nine cases of “pneumonia of unknown origin” have been identified in the country. According to experts, the disease is similar to COVID-19, flu and hantavirus, but they have nothing to do with it.

In Argentina, 9 people fell ill with “mysterious” pneumonia. Since the beginning of this week, three have already died, and six more people have been hospitalized. 

According to Luis Medina Ruiz, Minister of Health of the province of Tucumán, in all cases, an unknown respiratory infection led to the development of bilateral pneumonia, which resembles covid on x-rays. 

According to Science Times, doctors noticed the similarity of the unknown disease with COVID-19, influenza and hantavirus (usually infection occurs through contact with rodents), but testing for these viruses gave a negative result.

Tests for coronavirus, flu, colds A and B, hantavirus and 25 types of bacteria were all negative.

It is also reported that 8 out of 9 cases worked as doctors in the same private clinic. Among the dead is a 70-year-old patient of the same clinic, who was hospitalized there for surgery.

The new outbreak spreads due to people’s collective vulnerability to infectious diseases, experts say. However, it is still unclear what caused the mysterious pneumonia.

At the beginning of the pandemic, virologists warned that South America is a huge population of bats, where COVID can migrate, mutate and return in an incomprehensible way. Tests will not recognize it, and the severity of the disease can increase by orders of magnitude. 

So, Professor Devi Sridhar, head of the Department of Global Health at the University of Edinburgh, noted that news of the unknown deadly virus is alarming, but more information is needed about its mode of transmission and the underlying cause. 

At the same time, virology professor Jonathan Ball from the University of Nottingham suggested that in fact this disease may not be a new disease, but a set of rare symptoms of an already known respiratory infection – just a virus that caused “mysterious” pneumonia, yet undetected by diagnostic laboratories.

People are falling on the streets of El Salvador?

Strange things are also happening in neighboring El Salvador, where people suddenly began to fall in the streets and die for no reason. By mid-August, there were five cases that frightened everyone, so the topic was quickly hushed up and conspiracy theorists did not follow it. But it may well be that people are mowed down by the same infection – throughout South and Central America.  

Let’s recall the history of the emergence of covid. It all started just with SARS, everyone ran puzzled over what it was. Therefore, everything will become clear only after a couple of weeks, maybe a month, so we are watching closely the events in Argentina.