Pablo Sigal
06/30/2020 - 12:16
- Clarín.com
- Society
Concern about the occupation of intensive care beds is particularly focused on the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. However, according to daily reports from the Ministry of Health, in one week the occupation grew more nationally than in the City and the GBA.
The Ministry began to report this data on Wednesday of last week, in advance of the announcement of the recharged quarantine. The main argument for extending compulsory isolation and tightening it was that intensive care beds, especially in the AMBA, could collapse in a few days.
That is why it was decided to stop all the activity again and return to almost zero pages to flatten the curve. The objective is to reduce demand in hospitals so that what happened in Chile does not happen in Argentina, where the health system ended up collapsing. That's when the death curve starts to climb.
However, the daily data speak of a greater increase in the occupation of intensive care beds in the interior of the country than in the critical zone of the coronavirus. In other words, in that 85 percent of the country that was already able to return to practically normal activity, with phase 5 of the quarantine and what is now called "the new normal".
Last Wednesday there were 433 in the country hospitalized in intensive therapy for coronavirus. Today there are 507. This is 74 more patients. They were added at the rate of 25 patients per day except from Saturday to Sunday when the country's intensive therapies only added 12 patients.
In the discrimination by geographic area, when the report began in Nación, 45 percent of the intensive care beds were occupied , while in the AMBA this figure was 52 percent. In the report from Monday night, at the national level, the occupation reached 50.6 percent while in the AMBA it was 55.9 percent.
The baso is fuller in the metropolitan area, but it fills up faster -at least in these six days- in Nación. Life continues in most of the country and patients continue to go to hospitals, either for mild or severe cases, from other pathologies.
Hence, the possibility of transferring patients from the Capital and Province to the Interior of the country in the event that hospitals collapse due to the demand for severe coronavirus patients, if necessary, would not be such a simple resource to use. hand.
According to the records of the last days, while in the country the occupation rose 5.6 percentage points , in the City and the GBA that jump was 3.9 percentage points . Relative to the national average, there are more empty beds now in the metropolitan area than in the Interior.
The data is not consistent with the distribution of coronavirus cases in the country, since 90 percent of coronavirus cases are located in the City and the GBA: a total of 56,624 in the metropolitan area against 62,269 in the total country. In other words, there are only 5,645 cases in the other provinces, of which 1,961 are in Chaco.
The application of convalescent serum from the plasma of recovered patients who generated antibodies is a protocol that is serving, according to the Buenosairean authorities, so that less people arrive at the instance of intensive care and respirator . However, it is still in the investigation stage.
The new overloaded quarantine that begins in full dimension this Wednesday would serve in the medium term to further decompress the level of occupation of intensive care . There are a total of more than 11,668 intensive care beds in the country. A little more than half of this is occupied, but only 507 correspond to Covid-10 cases. In other words, 1 in 11 hospitalized today in intensive care units have coronaviruses.
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