Pablo Sigal
08/31/2020 - 20:07
Clarín.com
Society
With the
9,309 cases
of coronavirus this Monday, Argentina finally got fully among
the ten countries with the most infections in the world
.
He went to Chile, just one day after the unexpected meeting between President Alberto Fernández and the Minister of Health of that country, Enrique Paris.
It was similar to the one he had in May with Sweden.
When it seemed that
diplomatic short-circuits due to the pandemic would
no longer occur, the pattern of sensitive comparisons was repeated, to show its own virtues based on the weaknesses of others.
Chile, it should be clarified, is another country whose population is not comparable to that of Argentina.
It has less than half the people.
Cases skyrocketed there in July, and its healthcare system couldn't keep up.
They do not have as many deaths as in Colombia and Peru, but they
number more than 11,000
.
The fact that it has already reached the peak of infections means that now Argentina, which
has not yet reached that stage
, has surpassed it.
Now, our country is approaching Spain.
At the current rate of accumulation of daily cases, it is likely that
in ten days it will reach it
.
There were more than 29 thousand dead.
Argentina today registers
just over 8,600
.
And the unknown is still how much this figure will reach from the incessant accumulation of daily infections in the AMBA and, now, also in the Interior.
Néstor Barraza, statistics professor at the University of Tres de Febrero, together with his faculty team, developed
the MTBD
(Mean Time Between Deaths)
index
, an algorithm that allows us to see
how often there is a death from coronavirus
in the country and in the world.
In Argentina, today there is a death every
6 and a half minutes
.
In the first week of August there was
one death every 12 minutes.
New murals of the pandemic in the city of Buenos Aires.
Photo: EFE
Two conclusions
can be drawn on this data
.
The first and most obvious is that during this last month there was a
sharp acceleration in deaths
from Covid.
The second is that the fatality rate (which will certainly have to be reviewed at the end of the pandemic) is getting
higher and higher
.
It fell below 1.90 at its best and today it is reaching 2.1.
The acceleration of deaths in the country since August 10 occurred at the rate of
one second every two or three days
.
The algorithm does not make a simple division of the number of deaths in a given period, but is based on what is known as a
stochastic process
: it studies how the probabilities vary as a function of time.
"The less time passes between one death and another, the
more likely it
is that there will be a new one," explains Barraza.
The unknown that persists is how
far the deaths will climb
from this daily increase in cases, which would continue at least until mid-September.
To have a clue, you can check what was the maximum degree of acceleration in
the countries that have already reached the peak.
Argentina shares the top 10 in the ranking of coronavirus cases, in addition to Brazil, with two other South American countries:
Peru and Colombia
.
The first reached the peak with
one death every three minutes
, while Colombia has not yet overcome the worst of its pandemic and is already at that same average.
China, the country of origin of the pandemic, at its most critical moment had one death every 7 minutes;
Sweden, one in 10;
and
Chile, one every 5
.
Other examples: Germany had a victim every 4 minutes and 20 seconds, while Canada reached a speed of 5 and a half minutes.
What does the speed of deaths depend on?
Mainly, of three elements: the first, the number of infected;
the second, the
vulnerability
of the infected;
the third, the response capacity of the health system.
According to Barraza, "the higher the speed (shorter time between deaths) is a sign that the health system is overwhelmed."
The three countries with the highest death rates in the world were the United States, with
one death every 21 seconds
;
France, with one every 50 seconds;
and Great Britain, with one every 57 seconds.
In Brazil there was almost one death per minute and in Italy, every minute and 10 seconds.
The number of cases in Argentina for now will continue to grow until the peak is reached, with the
impulse of the Conurbano
and a City that prays to the curve to keep it at bay.
However, once the worst of the crisis is over and infections begin to decline, only then will the peak of deaths occur, between 15 and 20 days later.
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