10/21/2020 9:17 AM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 10/21/2020 9:17 AM
After the decision of the Oxford University database to stop reporting on tests in Argentina because it considers that the information does not reflect the reality of infections in the country, Fernán Quirós, Buenos Aires Minister of Health, acknowledged that "
in at the time of the peak it was very difficult to keep up with the load
"and he understands what is" what is happening to the provinces in this period ".
And he explained: “There are a number of people who got sick and one can approach that number with seroprevalence and then compare it with the number of people who were tested and tested positive.
It is the best indicator of the quality of the testing strategy or whether the tests were correct or not. "
According to what the head of the Health of the Nation portfolio explained, Ginés González García, they began to notice
a drop in the number of daily tests
that were reported from the provinces.
Given this, González García communicated with the health authorities of the provinces: "There they told us that what happened is that the positive tests were reported, but the negative ones were not reported. So in the final report we said fewer tests than we did And that also gave a very high rate of positivity. "
Quirós also noted that "the Ministry of Health of the Nation has developed an improvement of the system to load the data in a more simplified way and it was launched last week and many effectors took the opportunity to dump data that they had not been able to dump."
The Buenos Aires minister highlighted something that happened around the world with the pandemic and that led to "an
unpredictable and excessive overload of the work
to assist those who became ill and also in the national reporting system."
"It is evident that the manual loading of the data meant a huge work effort and that includes the issue of loading the PCRs, which is a very important volume," Quirós justified.
Regarding the situation in the City, he announced that they are preparing a
seroprevalence report
where it will be possible to see "the relationship between the real patients on one side and those we could identify."
"In the City we have done a very intensive tracking, testing and isolation task. The important thing beyond the test number is the ability to identify the candidate to be tested, who are more at risk than the average citizen and that is what we have made us ", remarked the Buenos Aires Minister of Health.
And he reported: "We are diagnosing per day a number of asymptomatic almost equal to the number of symptomatic."
This arose apart from the decision of the prestigious database created at the University of Oxford,
Our World in data
, to stop providing statistical information on coronavirus tests carried out in Argentina.
Through Twitter, a manager of ourworldindata.org, Edouard Mathieu, stated: "We have decided to remove Argentina from our database.
The information provided by the Government is not of sufficient quality
to correctly reflect the magnitude of the tests."
JPE
Look also
Ginés González García admitted errors in the test figures after the snub of an Oxford site and pointed to the provinces
Coronavirus: Argentina reached seven months of quarantine with more than 27,000 deaths
