Pablo Sigal
10/19/2020 6:02 AM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 10/19/2020 6:02 AM
Argentina will reach one million cases of coronavirus this Monday and, at the same time, can surpass Sweden in
deaths per million inhabitants
.
This means that the proportion of fatal victims of Covid in relation to the population
will from now on be higher in Argentina than in the Scandinavian country
, whose current mark is 585. The data closes a circle that began at the beginning of May, when President Alberto Fernández condemned the healthcare model of that country to
enhance his own.
And the Swedes answered him.
Our nation had already surpassed Sweden in the absolute number of deaths.
It was August 17.
That day Argentina had
5,814 deaths
.
Today it exceeds
26 thousand
.
From that moment to the present, two months passed.
In Sweden, there are
5,910 deaths
today
,
1.6 percent more
.
In Argentina, during the same period, the increase was
350 percent.
The difference between Argentina and Sweden was the time when the cases and deaths occurred.
In that country, they chose to avoid quarantine and trusted in the
care and distancing
that the population could have in their daily lives.
That allowed
schools, industries and businesses to
continue operating.
In Argentina, even today, when the national quarantine is about to reach
seven months this Tuesday
, the decision of the Government continues to be to establish the closure of activities as a
tool
to reduce the number of infections.
This occurs even though reality seems to have already shown that mandatory isolation worked for
the first 90 days
(until the end of June) and then stopped.
Added to the alleged lack of an eternal quarantine to avoid contagion is the economic cost of having sustained the closure of activities
more than that decision could contribute in epidemiological terms.
Critics of this policy believe that "the patient was operated on with a parrot beak," instead of with a scalpel, which resulted in
extra cost
for the country.
Advocates of unlimited restrictions warn that without quarantine, or a shorter one, the lethality
would have been even higher.
Today there is a heterogeneous scenario in Argentina, with the AMBA showing a
still high
number of cases
but in decline
, and an Interior in which the Covid attacks as it had not done in the metropolitan area.
Just look at the contagion figures for Santa Fe, which has reached
2,600 cases in 24 hours
, something that never happened in the Federal Capital.
Santa Fe is close to
80 thousand cases
, while the city of Buenos Aires has barely exceeded 140 thousand.
Córdoba (62 thousand infections), Mendoza (37 thousand) and Tucumán (34 thousand) are the other three provinces that
have
registered the most positives
in recent weeks.
Despite the fact that the province of Buenos Aires continues to be the district that contributes the most cases of coronavirus daily, it was
the late engine of the Interior
that prevented Argentina from reaching the peak earlier, to finally begin to travel the
descending slope
.
Thus, there was an accumulation that led the country to rank
fifth in the world ranking
in infections and in
12th place
in both absolute deaths and deaths per million.
However,
there is no acceleration of the
contagion
curve
in the national territory, but a slow deceleration as that chimerical peak is reached.
The number of cases
doubled nationwide in 41 days.
In other words, in that amount of time there were 500 thousand new cases of coronavirus.
That gives an average of
12,195 infections per day
.
The record day occurred last Thursday, with 17,096 cases.
If there were a moral in
the symbolic fact of surpassing Sweden
in the number of deaths per million inhabitants, it would be quite close to what the authorities of that country responded after the criticisms made by the Argentine State five and a half months ago.
They affirmed that to face this pandemic there were no pre-established recipes that would guarantee success and that it
was necessary to wait more time to draw conclusions.
Argentina will not only surpass Sweden in this key index to evaluate the performance of each country during the pandemic, but it will also be closer to nations that, “when things were going well”,
no one would have ever imagined reaching
:
Italy
has 605 deaths per million ;
United Kingdom
(which initially bet on herd immunity), 642;
France
, 513;
Colombia
, 568.
Until the official part of this Sunday, Argentina accumulated
989,680 infections, 26,267 deaths and 580 deaths per million
.
The figures for some of the countries mentioned have already fallen short during this long journey.
And those that still rank above are likely to be surpassed by local records in the not too distant future as well.
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