Spanish – The regime of Nicolás Maduro is desperate to detect possible cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) and has established dozens of mobile testing sites in Caracas for rapid testing. People who test positive are immediately “kidnapped” and taken to hotels where they are crowded and forced to share rooms with strangers. Although the test result is unreliable, these people are not treated as patients, but as prisoners.
Maduro’s regime, with the help of the National Armed Forces (FAN), militiamen, and paramedics, “fish” for people in the streets and perform the disputed quick tests. As they accumulate a good number of people with supposedly positive results, they transfer them in buses to low-budget hotels. There, they lock these people up for approximately seven days while they carry out the confirmatory tests (PCR) for coronavirus. If the person is negative, they are released. If they test positive, they begin to receive treatment.
“I was not allowed to get clothes, nor talk to my children. When I had a false positive, they forced me to stay in a hotel with two other people in a room. There, they locked the doors, and we were forbidden to leave. We were in prison,” complained one of the “patients,” who was released after seven days of abduction because his confirmatory test was negative.
This was at a hotel located in the municipality of Libertador. The premises were taken over by the regime, and the owner was forced to provide a percentage of rooms for alleged COVID-19 patients. The other rooms are for normal rent. The owners are obliged to have a minimum staff to service the restaurant and thus provide food for the new kidnapped “guests.”
“Every day, a doctor would come to interview us and follow up on our medical history. We were prevented from taking any medication until the actual results of the reliable tests were confirmed. Some people have been waiting for more than seven days for the PCR test and are held there; they can’t go home,” the source said.
“I was forced to sleep in the same bed with people I didn’t know. All the logistics were coordinated by personnel from the communes. Also, militiamen and some soldiers were guarding us,” he said. “Although I was held at the hotel, they allowed me to receive clothes, hygiene items, and even food brought by my relatives, I felt like a prisoner. The worst thing is that I did not know of any case that finally tested positive,” he added.
The source revealed that in the case of his hotel, there were almost a hundred people kidnapped. The number can be multiplied by different hotels and isolation centers in the country. There would be thousands of “false positives” held against their will in Venezuela.
The lie of the evidence and the figures
According to official figures from the Maduro regime, 317 people were infected in the last 24 hours, bringing the number of confirmed cases to 8,010.
According to a source at Venezuela’s National Institute of Hygiene (INH), the number of cases provided by the regime is true, but the number of tests that Maduro boasts is incorrect. Many of these are unreliable quick tests. The INH is the only agency in charge of processing coronavirus PCR, and it is from this that the official figures offered by the regime emerge.
The dictator has assured that more than 1.4 million tests have been carried out in the country- a total of 47,073 tests per million inhabitants. However, this number is not trustworthy because most of the tests are quick tests and aren’t very reliable.
“Nicolás Maduro continues to lie, continues to manipulate the data on positive cases and the mortality rate,” said Congressman José Manuel Olivares, who frequently issues reports on the real situation of the coronavirus in Venezuela. Olivares said that while 71 people have officially died from the virus in the country, monitoring in hospitals indicates that 59 other Venezuelans have not been included in the registry. This would bring the total number of deaths in the country from the virus to 130, for a mortality rate which is 2% higher than that reported by the regime.
Recently, the United Nations contradicted Maduro’s regime and revealed that 97.7% of the coronavirus tests carried out in Venezuela are defective.