BUENOS AIRES, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- Argentine President Alberto Fernandez on Wednesday compared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic to "walking blindly through a swamp," given that new strains of the virus have been recently detected, raising questions about the efficacy of vaccines.

Dealing with the health crisis "is the closest thing to walking blindly through a swamp, because you don't know where you are stepping," said Fernandez during the inauguration of a penitentiary hospital in the city of Lomas de Zamora, about 20 kilometers south of the capital Buenos Aires.

"When we thought that the problem was going to be overcome, a strain appears in Europe and everything seems to start over, the same nightmare," Fernandez said, according to state news agency Telam.

Argentina registered its first case of COVID-19 on March 3 and reported a total of 1,555,279 cases of infection and 42,254 deaths as of Tuesday night.