Pablo Sigal
09/01/2021 4:59 PM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 09/01/2021 4:59 PM
While the Delta variant is expected to spread its wings in Argentina, one fact draws attention: despite the fact that cases have had a
sustained decline
in recent weeks, our country continues to be the
"red dot"
of Covid in South America.
This means two things: on the one hand, it is costing Argentina much more than the rest of the region to come
down from the peak of the second wave
.
Second, that the peak from which it should have started the decline was much higher than that of the rest of the countries.
Argentina registered
822 cases per million inhabitants
in the last week
, which places the country at the top of registered infections, followed by Brazil, with
760 cases per million
.
Both countries are well above the rest, which have less than 300 weekly cases per number of inhabitants.
Our country has had a marked decrease in cases during August and in the last week the drop was
27 percent
.
The decrease in the number of deaths in the last seven days has been
28 percent
, according to the site Our World in Data.
The daily average of cases during the last seven days was
5,362
, while in the previous week it had been
7,377
.
The daily average of deaths went from
200 to 144
.
In deaths per inhabitant in the same period, our country equals Brazil, with 22 deaths.
Then comes Paraguay, with 21. In the rest of the region there were half or less.
It should be noted that the countries considered do not include the small territories of Las Guianas and Suriname, which due to their
small populations
are, since the pandemic began, those with the most cases and deaths per millions of inhabitants of the continent.
That has not changed.
It has been a long road traveled by Argentina from the average of
37,039 cases
for a day registered in the last week of May, according to the Covid Stats site.
From then until today, the seven-day average has dropped
more than 85 percent
.
Three other encouraging data: the levels of positivity in recent days have remained
below 10 percent
;
the occupancy of intensive therapy beds is
below 50 percent
both in the AMBA and at the national level;
and there are less than
200 thousand
active
infected
.
That is the photo of the last days.
If you look at
the entire movie
, since the Covid arrived in Argentina in March 2020 until now, the country is ranked 19th in cases per million worldwide and 11th in deaths, only surpassed by Peru and Brazil. in Southamerica.
A Covid test in Buenos Aires.
Photo: AFP
Worldwide there was a
slight decrease
in cases in the last 7 days, of 1 percent.
While in the case of deaths there was a drop of 5 percent.
This occurs despite the fact that in much of the planet
the Delta variant
has entered into action and is much more contagious.
Vaccination has played its part in this tug of war game, since what it does is not prevent infections but rather cause
an underreporting of infections
because many more people are asymptomatic or oligosymptomatic, they are not tested and their case does not add up. in statistics.
This does not mean that they are not contagious.
Precisely, the danger at this stage of the pandemic is the
imbalance between vaccinated and unvaccinated
with regard to the transmission of the virus.
The same Covid viral load can be harmless for some and very dangerous for others.
What about the Delta in Argentina?
Little is known.
Only isolated records of specific detections of presumed community circulation in some cities, although
the prevalence of the variant
today in the country is difficult to determine because there have been no new epidemiological reports.
What is known is how the variant behaves once community circulation is confirmed, whose requirement is that it represents
1 percent
of the cases that are registered.
From that moment it takes between 4 and 5 weeks to become 20 percent of cases.
And between 8 and 10 weeks to be 80 percent.
$
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