Pablo Sigal
05/11/2020 - 12:12
- Clarín.com
- Society
The quarantine begins to relax in the City of Buenos Aires, something that the number of cars and people on the street made evident on this May 11, 2020, 53 days after the mandatory quarantine began. In fact, what the authorities are not daring to publicly and brutally recognize is happening: people are going out to catch it . The distancing measures and protocols will serve to placate him in part, but will not stop the inevitable.
"Mandatory isolation does not stop the pandemic, it only delays it in time," explained Adolfo Rubinstein, former Minister of Health, this Monday morning. Therefore, the important thing from now on will not be so much looking at how many new infected there are per day but how many dead.
President Alberto Fernández has repeated over and over during his press conferences that everything that Argentine society did when staying at their homes for almost two months was to "save time . " That is, so that the health system is as well prepared as possible to face the peak of the pandemic. That responsiveness will now be the key that will shape the future. If the health system begins to collapse, the advanced steps will have to be retraced and the quarantine will be tightened again.
One of the keys to understanding why the quarantine began to relax at this time is that precisely that number of deaths per day is controlled . While many were alarmed yesterday by the record of contagions nationwide, 258 , and even more so with 165 of those contagions having occurred in the city of Buenos Aires, there was another figure in sight that said a lot: 5 deaths in 24 hours . There's another number that speaks volumes: occupancy in intensive care beds is at 40 percent.
With the five deaths yesterday, the total deaths from coronavirus reached 305 , out of a total of 6,034 confirmed cases . The percentage of deaths until yesterday was then 5.05%. How did that curve behave over time? It was changing. When the quarantine began on March 20, the death rate was 2.2 percent. It was known that it was going to rise and rose evenly and steadily throughout the month of April. When the first 100 deaths were reached, the percentage was already at 4.43 percent. And on May 4, the curve peaked at 5.36 percent . From that moment it began to drop and this Sunday it was at 5.05 percent.
The increase in cases of contagion will not occur only due to the flexibility of the quarantine (in fact, the social behavior of these days will only have an impact on statistics in about two weeks ), but rather due to the focus of the tests, especially in the vulnerable neighborhoods of the City, where the incidence of the virus is growing much more strongly than in the rest of the Buenos Aires map.
It should also be noted that, as new cases of coronavirus are added every day, there are people who are cured. Thus, 1,837 patients of the more than 6,000 cases registered in the country have already been discharged. This is 30%. If the dead are discounted, the account shows that 64.5% of the total remain active: there are 3,892 people with the infection in progress. To put it another way, out of every 20 infected in the country so far, 12 are still active, 6 were discharged and 2 died.
The important thing, based on this new reality on the streets, will not be so much how many people will catch it (obviously the fewer the better) but who will contract Covid-19. That is, what is the profile of the new infected every day. At this point, everything seems to indicate that it will be key for the populations at risk to continue with the mandatory isolation as much as possible, with the appearance of the vaccine as the horizon. Because from that profile of infected the precisely result that matters most: the number of deaths that Argentina will have when this experiment ends.
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