The first lasted 232 days.
This Friday marks one year of the first confinement.
What we learned and how the ASPO that arrives with the cold will differ.
Irene Hartmann
03/19/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 03/19/2021 1:49 PM
"It will seek to restrict
as little as possible
and sustain industrial, economic and social activity."
This was the response of the Presidency spokesman when
Clarín
asked him if they are analyzing implementing another confinement and what it would be like.
Several statements emerge from the phrase: that they expect (soon, and that is why there is already a plan) a second wave of coronavirus.
That there will be another quarantine.
That they recognize important errors in the quarantine-2020, decreed just a year ago.
That the new confinement (detailed at the end of this note)
will be different.
It would be enough if it did not last 232 days like the "first" quarantine, started on
March 19
by President Alberto Fernández and ended on
November 6, 2020
, when the change from ASPO to DISPO was announced for a part of the country.
From Isolation to Preventive and Mandatory Social Distancing.
Although these days the entire country crosses its fingers pleading for more vaccine shipments, it is logical to accept (as President Alberto Fernández did this Thursday on the national network) that the
"immunization vs. second wave" race
has a sung result: hardly
24 million
people in risk groups are vaccinated for the winter.
And the plateau of cases, it is known, has a high base.
There will be a
new lockdown
.
It will have other rules.
Some that ideally allow us to repeat the successes of last year and avoid, completely, the mistakes and the
strong social and economic deterioration
that it caused.
Let's see what
teachings he
left
2020 to apply in 2021.
The first line of fight against the pandemic.
A patient is rushed to intensive care at the Hospital Evita de Lanús.
Photo Guillermo Rodríguez Adami
The "stamina" to buy time
If one asks any local Covid expert to analyze the errors of the epidemiological management of the last year, they start (no matter their political sign) with what everyone calls "the great Argentine success" of the pandemic:
having prevented the collapse of the healthcare system.
It is not minor.
It means that the more than 54,000 deaths from coronavirus registered at the end of the note have a counterweight.
It does not console, but it reconfigured (for "
less worse
") the tragic destiny in which we seemed to plunge: the certainty (with the fresh images of Italy sunk in hell) that in Argentina
many more people
would die
than did, and not just for Covid.
The cause could be summed up in a general
insufficiency of the health system
: lack of intensive care beds, respirators and even trained (and not infected) personnel.
Although there are records of
"endurance" at the limit of capacity
in provinces such as Neuquén, Río Negro, Tierra del Fuego, Mendoza, La Rioja and Salta, it would be a mistake (or an injustice) to look back and ignore that the dreaded collapse sanitary
did not occur.
The first months of the pandemic will remain in the collective memory as those in which
we "gain time."
What, instead, were the mistakes?
Businesses closed in the city of Buenos Aires due to quarantine.
Photo: Andres D'Elía
The economy
Since the 2001 crisis (when the economic collapse reached 10.9%) the INDEC did not register a fall in activity as great as that generated by the strict quarantine:
10%
per year, which started with a 26% decrease in April, product of the
lockdown
that left trade, industrial production and transportation free.
It is true that a minimum balance was made with the progress of essential services and the booming electronic commerce, as well as the aid of 10,000 pesos through the Emergency Family Income (IFE) and the ATP loans for the payment of salaries.
But no measure stopped the decline in employment: in the third quarter, black jobs
fell almost 28%
, compared to the same period the previous year.
The self-employed,
22%
.
Formal wage earners,
3%
.
According to data from the Argentine Confederation of Medium Enterprises (CAME), by the end of the year
90,700 stores and 41,200 small and medium enterprises
had closed.
More than 185,000 employees were affected by that drop.
Other activities are dying today beyond the strict quarantine.
According to
Graciela Fresno
, from the Gastronomic Hotel Business Federation of the Argentine Republic (FEHGRA),
70%
of the hotels are closed.
In the summer, the 30% standing did not exceed the 10% occupancy.
And "in November a year-on-year loss of
200,000 jobs
was estimated
, between formal, informal and monotax."
As Daniel Fernández Canedo warned in these pages, although "2020 marked an inflation that averaged 36.1%, in the end, with the December data, the
annualized
cost of living
marked an increase rate of
60%
".
To these figures are added the comings and goings linked to the parallel dollar, which in October reached 195 pesos.
Tests in neighborhoods of Tucumán to detect cases of coronavirus.
Photo: Province of Tucumán
Insufficient testing
From the wide glossary of the "new coronavirus" stands out the triad
"test-trace (close contacts) -isolate
.
"
It is the undisputed strategy to cut the geometric increase in infections, considering that
80% of people pass the infection without (or with mild) symptoms, but they infect others.
We must travel to the beginning of the second half of 2020 and recover this feeling: how we went (especially in the AMBA) of professing pride in the few cases of Covid (founded, we believed, in compliance with the quarantine. The streets without cars ; the sidewalks, desolate ...) to understand that
contagions proliferated silently.
They were hardly wanted
close contacts and
little testing was done
.
We were on a different path from the countries that best faced the pandemic.
We passively awaited the mythical "peak".
The consequences were seen later.
Between August and October it was clear:
there was
6 to 8 times more infected than those diagnosed.
The “positivity” (the indicator that results from the positive tests on the total diagnoses made) reached 60%, comfortably more than the 10% recommended by the WHO.
Then a
Clarín's
report
warned that the lack of personnel (epidemiologists, basically) in health centers throughout the country had caused a fictitious increase in positivity, beyond the fact that it was already high.
The key:
not many of the negative results
obtained in the Detect tests
were loaded
.
Of the voices of the pandemic in Argentina stands out that of
Eduardo López
, head of the Department of Medicine of the Hospital de Niños “Ricardo Gutiérrez” and one of the few advisers to the Government who, unlike several of his colleagues, seems to continue to maintain that status .
In his opinion, “the early quarantine is
a fact to highlight
because the collapse of the health system was avoided.
Who knows what would have happened.
In addition, we had almost no diagnostic centers (
N. de la R .: until April, when the decentralization of the Malbrán Institute began
).
Having a country open without diagnostic capacity would have been
a catastrophe
”.
However, “the borders were closed very late.
We had to receive the Argentines who were outside and isolate them, but we should
have canceled the flights earlier
.
Second, very little was tested ”.
"The Detectar plan was
quite late.
In CABA it was a success in the popular neighborhoods, but it should have been implemented with more force, to identify many more cohabitants and close contacts of those diagnosed positive," he pointed out.
Would there be fewer deaths today?
For now, the Worldmeters ranking of the countries according to their tests per million inhabitants places Argentina in the 32nd position.
Not too good, not too bad.
It is a data to watch closely in the coming weeks.
The classrooms were empty during 2020. Classes in the country were suspended on March 16. Photo: José Gutierrez / Archive
Closed schools
More and more pediatricians and infectologists (and the Argentine Society of Pediatrics itself) are convinced that either
the schools closed too early in Argentina
or they should have opened on the margins of the spikes of contagion in the different provinces.
The rigidity of the quarantine was central to avoid the worst, but it
lacked fine tuning.
The families that lived through any of these scenarios know this well.
Boys from low-income households
displaced
from a system that demanded the impossible: good Internet connectivity to participate in classes and socialize with their peers, good mobile devices and, in many cases, to be able to print or travel to the copier next to the school to get supplies.
The requirements
they accentuated the educational gap.
Although the authorities sought to appease these inequities, the measures had varying degrees of effectiveness in the many public management schools.
In the private ones, the biggest inconvenience reported by the families was an “excess” that no one seemed to calculate according to the boys.
A demand on the verge of absurdity for locked up kids (even in kindergarten), in terms of the
number of zoom hours and piles of homework
, as if it had governed, instead of a pedagogical criterion, that of "
better than over a missing
”.
At the same time, in many public schools, the equation was
exactly the reverse.
According to Unicef, schools in Latin America were closed for an average of
158 days
, compared to the global average of 95.
Clarín
spoke with
Renato Stein
, director of the Infant Foundation in Brazil, pediatric pulmonologist, professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Porto Alegre and an expert in respiratory diseases.
He recalled that “no government was prepared for this.
In addition, initially it was not known what was going to happen to the boys, who were considered 'vectors' of the virus ”.
“Today we are almost certain that
they are not important vectors
.
Where schools were opened, the cases of adults did not increase, except for situations in which there are different variables involved, "he reassured.
Eduardo López acknowledged the bad step that was taken at the local level: “It is true that it took us a while to open the schools, not to mention that they
could have closed two months later
.
Of course, it was necessary to reach a consensus with the different groups that handle education ... call yourselves unions.
It was not easy.
But in the metropolitan area, since October they could have opened in a semi-face-to-face mode ".
López was emphatic: "
The WHO was wrong in suggesting the closure of schools
. More than a mistake, it is a lesson learned. We learned that schools are a reflection of what happens in society and one does not have to close them if not there is a very notable increase in the number of infections ”.
The first announcement, on March 19, 2020. A quarantine began that then no one knew how long it would last.
Photo: Presidency
Hasty federalization
The recognition that Argentina was experiencing “two epidemiological realities” was established in Decree 520 of June 7, 2020, after 70 days of strict quarantine
throughout the national territory.
Then, 23 provinces (all except CABA) went from ASPO to DISPO: 18 throughout their territory and 5 partially.
The decree argued that we had one of the lowest infection and mortality rates in the region.
It was true, although history may say otherwise, especially on the day when other equally important variables are thoroughly analyzed: the aforementioned
invisibility of infected people
(as a result of the few tests) and the delays in the loads of deceased by Covid, two "noisy" songs in many countries.
The recognition of two epidemiological scenarios was a successful measure, but too late:
more than two months with all social and economic activities frozen
, when most of the infections occurred in the metropolitan area.
Then, the issue of the “fine tuning” returns, taking the words of the deputy Pablo Yedlin, president of the Health Commission of Deputies: “With the Monday newspaper, a mistake was when we left the ASPO in the different localities.
The issue was too centralized.
There were many cases in the AMBA and all the provinces of Argentina were
still in strict quarantine, with no cases
.
The need to have applied a fine tuning by jurisdiction could be marked.
We didn't have it ”.
The consequences?
"When the cases finally arrived, we had been locked up for many weeks and that played against the possibility of sustaining the quarantine," he acknowledged.
It was September-October.
“In the interior, contagions increased and in CABA they decreased.
But since the whole country sees the same media (in Tucumán we see what accidents there were in La Noria bridge ...),
people in the provinces wanted to do what was done in the Capital
: relax ”, he analyzed.
The wear and tear of too long a quarantine put a repeated word on the table at the beginning of November, when the AMBA, after 232 days, went from ASPO to DISPO.
The term was "honesty."
The Government put in writing what was already happening in the streets.
The quarantine made more flexible "in fact".
Politicization and rift
The politicization of quarantine in Argentina, that is, how the political rift crossed the national Covid debate in the harshest months, was not wasted.
At the same time, it was
extremely sterile
.
Nothing productive (nor less infected, nor less dead ...) came out of the nihilistic claims of the "antiquarantine", nor of the fanatics of the official management of the pandemic, as if at some point
it would have been
faultless.
The tensions generated with countries like Sweden are unforgettable (and they were also useless), an example cited by President Alberto Fernández to support a hyperbolic rhetoric of the national management of the Covid.
In the eyes of the most critical, the distortions caused by the political push took away the effort that the authorities should have put into communicating the pandemic to the population.
At this point, Yedlin recalled that “there was a first stage in which the President was reporting the new measures, with the presence of the Head of the City Government (Horacio Rodríguez Larreta) and the Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires (Axel Kicillof).
At that time, communication was pretty good. "
However,
"later it began to have noises and problems were generated".
“We must remember that at that time we Argentines agreed on the measures that were taken.
As soon as the opposition began to criticize saying that we had the longest quarantine in the world,
communication began to fail
.
It was not possible to sustain the speech in front of the other question ”, admitted Yedlin.
In short, “when things start to crack, they lose.
We could have been deeper. "
From now on, “it is essential to continue without cracking ourselves.
It is an electoral year, but we must avoid putting the political discussion in the middle ”.
The misuse of the mask, often under the nose, is one of the deficits due to the lack of awareness. Photo Guillermo Rodríguez Adami
Lack of awareness
Eduardo López observed other errors in the management of the Covid: “Communication was not consistent over time.
A message directed by groups was missing.
It was reported in general, but no communication was made, for example,
to adolescents
, who began to have a role since October, when they made the quarantine more flexible ”.
In this, he lamented, we remain the same: "We do not have a communication about the importance of distance and the
proper use of the chinstrap, which is used
very irregularly
.
A look from the outside?
Clarín
spoke with an eminence in the study of "aerosols", the particles that we emit (and remain floating in the air) when we speak or breathe, responsible for most of the Covid infections.
He is
José Luis Jiménez
, chemist and researcher at the University of Colorado, United States.
Jiménez (as before López) questioned the influential role in the countries of the region of a "wrong" World Health Organization.
"On March 28,
the WHO
said that claiming that the coronavirus was transmitted through the air was 'misinformation'
. It was a scientific error comparable to when the Church locked up Galileo for saying that the Earth revolved around the Sun," he ironized.
“The pandemic spread because of that
.
People go to great lengths to clean surfaces because they
didn't tell us how the virus actually spreads
.
The Covid reproduction number, R0, indicates that one person infects two or three others, and not 15 like measles.
It was not so difficult to lower the infections.
Why couldn't we?
Because they didn't tell us how the coronavirus is spread ”.
Vaccination of older adults at Luna Park Photo Juano Tesone
Quarantine II
Both the Government and the experts consulted took for granted another quarantine, in a context of
lack of vaccines.
But did they
a
learning
the mistakes made in the first confinement?
Yedlin believes so, and gave two clues as to what the new stage will be like to face the second wave of infections: "Surely it is not a general quarantine
or of the same intensity everywhere
."
In other words,
it will not be one quarantine but several
.
The premise is different: if the first confinement was intended to cover our spatio-temporal uncertainty about the circulation of the coronavirus (that is, "maximum" measures were adopted to combat an
omnipresent virus
), the intention now would be to adjust the strategy by spinning more fine.
v 1.5
Vaccination advance
Population with at least one dose of the vaccine.
Vaccinated population
Source:
MSAL
Infographic:
Clarín
TO
spatial
level
, looking at the
different epidemiological realities
of the jurisdictions.
That is why López spoke of the need to manage "selective quarantines,
focused by jurisdiction
, not extended to the entire country."
On the
temporal
plane
, we speak of measured, bounded confinements.
López believes that they should be done for "short periods, of no more than
10 or 15 days
."
None of this will work if the
borders
are not taken care of
and
vaccination
is accelerated
, he pointed out: "The income to the country should be minimized. And in addition to the arrivals presenting a PCR, they must control that they comply with strict quarantine. At the same time, the Government he has the obligation to speak with Janssen, with Cansino ... add more vaccines to increase immunization ".
Stay at home.
Unpublished postcard of the empty General Paz avenue.
The quarantine initially covered the entire territory of the country.
Photo: Marcelo Carroll
"The world has two options:
vaccination or quarantine,
" Renato Stein synthesized before predicting "chaotic" days, with the arrival of winter and the potential circulation of other viruses, especially among children.
“Last year we did not have respiratory syncytium (the cause of bronchiolitis) or colds or flu.
But now the boys are in school.
Although the protection elements will lower the contagion of these pathogens, we are going to live with the
opening and closing of schools
, due to the false alarms that are going to be generated ”, he warned.
Finally, Jiménez closed with an essential message: “Confinement works, but it is admitting that the measures we take to have a more normal life failed.
Before another quarantine, you have to change the measurements.
Stop spending time and money on disinfectants and focus your effort on air care.
We breathe this virus.
The first thing to do is explain it to the population ”.
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Look also
Living in a pandemic: the most significant images one year after the start of the quarantine