Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Now, in December, we brought you a rare bit of pandemic good news, Puerto Rico. After launching one of the most successful vaccination campaigns in the country, the Island achieved a vaccination rate of 75%, but just a month later, the story is changing. Puerto Rico has reported a record 84,000 new cases in December. What does that mean for Puerto Rico and for the pandemic in the rest of the country? Let's go to Dánica Coto, an Associated Press Caribbean correspondent based in Puerto Rico. Dánica, good to have you with us.

Dánica Coto: Thank you for having me.

Melissa: All right, this is going to sound like an odd question, but can we start with Bad Bunny?

Dánica: Definitely. That's one of the biggest reasons why the island is seeing an uptake or a big explosion really in COVID-19 cases. It was a two-day concert. It was outdoors and more than 70,000 people attended total. You have this huge crowd, they waited outside for hours before the concert started. Talking to concert goers, many of them said they started off with mask on, but by the start of the concert and halfway through a lot of them had removed their masks.

Officials say that more than 2000 people who attended that concert tested positive afterward, but they're still tallying how many others they might have infected. In addition to that concert, you also have holiday parties, family and friends visiting from abroad, and then you also had another, albeit smaller, much smaller, illegal outdoor concert held at a public housing project in late December as well that featured artists, including Rosalía and Raúl Alejandro with hundreds of people attending, crowded in and not wearing masks.

Melissa: Now, to be fair, though, those kinds of parties, whether they are the off-the-books kinds or whether they're the big concerts, like Bad Bunny. Over the course of this pandemic, they've happened in Chicago, in New York, in Georgia. It does seem like it maybe there are also the perfect storm of it happening during the Omicron and Delta variants, where you just had a higher transmissibility.

Dánica: Indeed, and the thing is a lot of people were looking forward to the holidays. The holidays here, as they say in Puerto Rico, start on Thanksgiving and don't end until the end of January. You have three months' worth of people celebrating, starting with Thanksgiving, family visiting, all that, but the thing is that the Island, the institutions have become overwhelmed with positive cases.

Given the medical staff, the quarantines that they're in, and also the high number of medical professionals who have left the Island in the past decade, largely because of the ongoing economic crisis. Right now we're at 6% positivity rate. In December, in mid-December that was 2%. The number of daily cases per 100,000 rose from 3 to 224 in just three weeks.

Melissa: Does the health department and health infrastructure on the island have the capacity to support these cases?

Dánica: They're warning that they're nearing capacity. Right now, in mid-December, there are about 30 people who are hospitalized and now there are more than 500. The other issues, also the amount of people trying to get tested. The health secretary gave a speech yesterday saying, "We understand that there's a lot of fear, people trying to get tested," but they stress that if you have symptoms or if that you've been in contact with someone who has COVID-19, only then should you get tested. He noted that the island is doing an average of 40,000 tests a day.

He said that not even 15% of those tests are necessary. This need to get tested has caused temporary shortages of home testing kits. People are going on social media trying to figure out where they're still available. The association of hospitals has also urged people to stop visiting emergency rooms, saying that the demand is overwhelming. The reason the island is nearing its capacity for trying to absorb all these new cases and hospitalizations resulted about more than a decade ago, when the worldwide economic crisis began.

Then, coupled with that, in 2015, the island declared it couldn't pay its more than $70 billion public debt load. Right now, the island is actually in a bankruptcy-like process, trying to restructure its debt. As well, it's still trying to recover from hurricane Maria, which hit in September, 2017. There's just been one hit after another. There was also a string of strong earthquakes about two years ago. The Island is trying to crawl out from all of this and then the pandemic arrives.

We are receiving federal funds, but still, there's just not enough staff to be able to handle not only people who are getting sick, but those who are seeking tests. For example, one pediatric hospital yesterday announced that it had reduced the number of beds available, given in part the exhaustion of medical staff. They just basically cannot keep up. Some people are standing in line starting at 2:00 in the morning trying to get tested. The government is urging some restraint, telling people to only get tested if they have symptoms or if they've been exposed to someone who's been sick.

Melissa: As you're talking about the efforts of the island to move out of the economic crisis largely imposed by this continuing colonialist relationship of the mainland US with Puerto Rico, and as you're walking us through this, it's also to the Puerto Rico is a space where tourism matters a lot. Obviously, when you're looking at a pandemic that has these critical effects, can you say a little bit about what the government there on the Island is doing relative to the question of tourism?

Dánica: Indeed, that's been a very contentious point here on the Island. Tourism actually makes up not even 7% of Puerto Rico's GDP, but the government is trying to grow that sector. Cruise ships are huge boosts to the island's tourism sector. The problem now is that the government announced recently that all cruise ship passengers who disembark must be fully vaccinated, and as well they must provide a negative test taken 48 hours prior to arrival.

This recently caused at least 15 cruise ships to cancel their visits, and tourism operators said the cancellations have caused about some $20 million in losses. Coupled with that, you have restaurants losing money, other operators losing money as well. Recent measures, given the increase in cases, include that businesses that serve food and drinks must reduce their indoor capity to half and their outdoor capacity to 75%, at least until mid-January.

The governor also has ordered restaurant employees and those who work in health and education sectors to receive their booster shots by mid-January. That's the problem, although many have received the first or second dose, not even 40% have received a booster shot.

Melissa: What do you think is going on with that?

Dánica: It's unclear, the health department is-- many are a little perplexed because, like you noted, there's such a high vaccination rate at the beginning, and now with the booster shot it's lagging. I think the health department is pushing for that. Again, there seems to be not as much enthusiasm or at least people, maybe in the holiday season, not remembering that they can get their booster shot now.

Melissa: There hasn't, in your sense though, been a decrease in trust around the booster shots, for example compared to the vaccines?

Dánica: I wouldn't say that there's been a decrease in trust. I just think people maybe forgot a little bit the pandemic exists, given that there was a 2% positivity rate at the time they were preparing for the holiday season. It just seemed like everything was slowly going back to normal. I think this recent spade might leave the island possibly seeing a rise in people getting booster shots.

Melissa: Yes, COVID keeps doing that to all of us. Dánica Coto is a Caribbean correspondent for the Associated Press there in Puerto Rico. Thank you so much for coming on The Takeaway.

Dánica: Thank you for having me.

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