Pablo Sigal
07/29/2021 6:02 AM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 7/29/2021 6:02 AM
Argentina combines
two variables
that today make it
a unique case
in the world: it is the most populous country that has had the highest number of
coronavirus
cases
per inhabitant.
To put it another way, among the nations of
more than 20 million people
, there is no other that surpasses it in the rate of infections.
The smaller a country is, the more chance there is that this index will be high.
As the
population and the extension of the territory
are greater, the possibility decreases.
Argentina finds itself in that exact mathematical balance that, hand in hand with the
management
of the pandemic, has guaranteed this destiny.
More "density" of Covid than in the United States and Brazil.
More than in Spain, Italy and Great Britain.
More than in Chile, Colombia and Peru.
Argentines have come, after
a year and five months
of health crisis, to integrate the most populous population with the highest number of infected per million in the world.
Argentina averages just over
107,000 cases
per million inhabitants, according to the latest update from the Worldometers site.
Ahead in that ranking there is no other country that has more than 20 million people.
What's more, many of the preceding ones are
very small countries
, with just a few hundred thousand citizens.
Those other nations, being among the tiniest on the planet, actually have
few cases of coronavirus
, which means a lot to the size of their populations.
Andorra heads the world ranking, which has only endured
14,586 cases
of Covid and that is enough to score
188,454 cases per million
, given that its population is barely 77 thousand inhabitants.
Andorra, the small state of 77 thousand inhabitants and the highest rate of infections in the world.
There are also Seychelles, Montenegro, Bahrain, San Marino, Gibraltar, Slovenia and Luxembourg.
The only ones with more than 10 million inhabitants in the top positions are the Czech Republic (4th), Sweden (12th) and the Netherlands (13th).
Argentina
now appears in 15th place on
that list
.
However, the population of the 14 preceding countries totals 47.5 million people, little more than the
entire Argentine population
.
Brazil
, whose president Jair Bolsonaro was highly criticized for handling the pandemic, has
92,435 infected per million
and is ranked 29th (5th among those with more than 20 million inhabitants).
The United States
, which went through the first part of the health crisis with the also controversial Donald Trump, adds up to now
106,543 cases per million
to occupy the 16th position (2nd in the ranking that articulates the population dimension).
Great Britain
, which at the beginning of the pandemic bet on the failed "herd immunity", suffers
84,543 cases per million
and is in the 32nd position (7th when introducing the mentioned minimum population condition).
During the administration of its own pandemic, Argentina had a policy of
organic confinement
, quite or completely opposite to those of those countries, and yet the results to date are not consistent with the initially dominant expectation.
Thus, the longer isolation time (a very long quarantine in 2020 and a shorter one during the second wave of 2021) did not translate into fewer infections.
The world average is
25,228 cases per million
, that is,
76 percent less
than the brand in our country.
It must also be borne in mind that many of the nations that “compete” in this ranking already suffer from
community circulation
of the most contagious variant of the known ones, the
Delta
, which should give them a health “handicap”.
However, the numbers show that they can dispense with that advantage to accommodate, even so, better than Argentina, where the Indian variant seems to have not yet circumvented the trap of
imported cases
, while the Government palpitates an
imminent irruption.
What is coming is worrisome for
two reasons
: on the one hand, although the peak of the second wave was left behind, the floor of daily cases is not too far from what was the peak of the first wave.
On the other hand, the delayed reaction in
prioritizing the second
doses leaves the most vulnerable unprotected.
In America, the only country that surpasses Argentina in cases per million inhabitants is
Uruguay
, which in absolute numbers adds 380,976 infections.
It is
7.8 percent
of those registered in Argentina, but at the same time too many for its population of 3.5 million inhabitants.
A pregnant woman receives a dose against Covid in Montevideo.
Photo: Xinhua
This scenario, which accounts for the dramatic impact that Covid has had in our country, has a reverse that -with a rush of optimism- could be labeled as “positive”: it is the nation with the smallest population in the world that has the
highest absolute number of recovered
from Covid.
They are
4.5 million
.
That figure would mean (if reinfections were not taken into account) that
1 in 10 Argentines
has convalescent status.
Only the United States, Brazil and Turkey - with larger populations - currently have a greater number of recovered.
In the world there are
178 million convalescents
, so the Argentines who overcame the disease represent
2.53 percent
.
Based on what its population means worldwide (0.64 percent), our country has
almost four times more
recovered from Covid than it would correspond to.
Vaccination, or its deficit, has done its part to arrive at this scenario of
exaggerated abundance
of coronavirus cases, which no one would have imagined months ago, but which the timing and
management of the pandemic
began to become predictable.
The
most effective
vaccines
to prevent contagion have so far proven to be those of messenger RNA technology (Pfizer and Moderna), with which Argentina -after extensive and onerous resistance- would only begin to massively vaccinate -except for the urgency of the group of minors with comorbidities - between the
end of this year and the beginning of next
.
The vaccines purchased from Moderna will be available in early 2022. Photo: AP
The vaccines so far available in the country (the Russian, one of the Chinese and the Oxford one) have not shown as much
effectiveness
as those two Americans. And even less when
a single dose
is applied
. The most effective of all those acquired by the Government has been Sputnik V, although the
lack of the second component
has prevented us from appreciating its full potential to interrupt the chain of infections.
Despite the local shortage of vaccines against Covid - especially during the first half of 2021 - this modest arsenal functioned as a
buffer
so that the
enormous number of cases
- the peak of the second wave almost tripled that of the first - did not convert also to the Argentineans -in relative terms- in the main
fatalities
of the world.
Argentina's lethality from coronavirus, however, ranks high globally.
Only three countries with more than 20 million inhabitants proportionally exceed us in deaths:
Peru, Brazil and Colombia
.
The local relationship with the world average is almost a carbon copy of that of the infected: outside borders there were 76.5 percent fewer deaths per million than in Argentina.
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