Adriana santagati
08/21/2020 - 17:05
- Clarín.com
- Cities
Next week, Alberto Fernández has to meet again with Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Axel Kicillof to define how the quarantine continues after August 30. And the head of the Buenos Aires government will go to that meeting with an encouraging figure that opens the door to greater flexibility: the decline in the R for 10 consecutive days.
The R, also called R0 or erre, is the contagiousness index , the number of people infected by an infected person at a certain point in the curve. If the R value is 1.1, it means that 10 infected will infect another 11 in a given time.
The R is today at 0.95. The Buenos Aires government celebrates this indicator as positive, since the City has never kept the R below 1 for so many consecutive days. However, they are far from “singing victory”, and this was made known by the Minister of Health, Fernán Quirós , at the press conference this Friday morning.
"It is at 0.95, there is a slight but sustained trend towards a decrease in cases , which does not mean anything in terms of relaxation because the number of cases per day is high," said Quirós, who insisted that it is "subtly below of one, but we have not gone through the worst because the number of cases per day is still very high ”.
When will the peak have passed? From Health they do not risk a date. They cannot say how many days the R should go below 1, or how much that number would have to go down to be able to say that we are already descending the slope. What they do affirm is that if the optimistic trend persists, this decline in R will not be abrupt .
"To have an R of 0.5 you have to go from 1,000 cases to 500 cases and that will not happen from one day to the next," they clarify. The decline in daily cases, they predict, will be how the rise was : that long-awaited peak ended up being a plateau, and it will also have to be retraced for the decline. "Lowering the number of daily cases is going to be very gradual and very stretched over time, " they anticipate.
On Thursday there were 1,280 cases registered in the Buenos Aires area, but in the City they do not look at isolated days, but do analyzes per week. And what you see is a stabilization, which the GBA is also tending towards. The shooting of the cases of the part of each night, they explain, is attributed to the outbreaks that are growing in the Interior, as in the province of Jujuy. CABA and the Province of Buenos Aires represented 79% of the cases on Thursday , when at some point they concentrated 95% of the total country.
"We have been decreasing for about 10 days, from a daily average of 1,200 to 1,300 cases to a current daily average of 900 to 1,000 cases per day," Quirós said at the conference. Another number that your portfolio tracks very closely and that also gives rise to optimism is bed occupancy . Mild patients admitted to hotels fell by almost half (they reached 3,000 and today there are 1,600), 759 of moderate beds are occupied (when they reached 1,000) and the most critical curve, therapy, although it has oscillations About 280 patients have been maintained for a month.
“We must not be too optimistic or trust ourselves, and maintain prudence and caution. But this allows you to think about advancing a little more, about gradually retracing the measures ", they grant in the Buenos Aires Government, in reference to the plan of openings in stages that the Rodríguez Larreta administration has.
The optimistic scenario that they expect is that with these next easing the trend to gradually decline in R and in bed occupancy will continue. "When these indicators stabilize in a sustained manner with greater circulation, only then can we begin to think that the worst is over ," they conclude.
ACE