Cedeño stressed that the objective is to safeguard the health of the population without affecting the economic reactivation, but with a health order and that if cases continue to skyrocket, they could devise other strategies.

We have new strategies that we are not necessarily going to have to close the economic sectors, but rather we can make sanitary fences, as I have said before, a street, building, village, a district looking for a way to maintain that balance of the economic sector and health system, explained Cedeño.

Cedeño's statements were made during a traceability operation in Veracruz where he also commented that it still cannot be said that hospitals are about to collapse due to the increase in cases in recent weeks and that in the same way they are working to avoid exceeding the capacity of medical centers.

The most certain thing is that we will continue to report many cases in the coming days, mainly because the team is on the street and that is why we are finding the cases and that is the key. If, unfortunately, people are letting their guard down, they are getting infected, we are detecting them promptly, he said.

On the other hand, given the imminent approval of a vaccine against the virus, Cedeño emphasized that this will be one more tool to combat the virus, because in the same way, biosafety standards must continue to be applied.

He argued that it is likely that the eventual vaccine would be arriving in Panama in the first four months of 2021, although a date cannot be specified.