The Ministry of Health presented this Tuesday the long-awaited
Vital Statistics 2021
,
the toughest year of Covid in Argentina
.
Some figures in the report confirm already established hypotheses.
Others surprise.
Of the first, it is reaffirmed that the coronavirus was
the main cause of death in 2021
, and that it generated
a notable excess of deaths, of 26.3%
, compared to a year without a pandemic.
Of the latter, a shocking fact stands out:
the maternal mortality ratio doubled
compared to 2020. The cause, SARS-CoV-2.
The presentation, which was made online in person in front of a group of scientific journalists, was given by Carla Vizzotti, Minister of Health, and Analía Rearte, National Director of Epidemiology and Strategic Information and Vizzotti's right-hand man during the pandemic.
Of the long hour and a half in which Rearte shared figures, slides, and data analysis, there were
a few obviously hard minutes
: enunciating the maternal mortality figures that year, a group considered "at risk" during the pandemic, but whose vaccination in general ( not only for those with comorbidities) only began in mid-June 2021.
Already in the 2020 Vital Statistics report, compared to 2019, an increase in deaths in this group
had been observed
: from a ratio of 3 it had gone to 4.1 per 10,000 live births.
In the 2021 report, the figure went to 7.4 per 10,000, so
it doubled
.
They are deaths generated by what Rearte described as
“external causes”
.
In other words, unrelated to the three stages that are usually considered in causality analyses:
pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum
.
“It was the Covid”
, Rearte pointed out, before clarifying that most of the deaths were “institutionalized”, that is, in hospitalization processes, and not in homes.
Regarding the
excess of deaths in general
, it must be remembered that in the same report for 2020, the year of the hard quarantine with few cases of coronavirus,
almost 10% more had been reported
.
The 2021 record far exceeds that figure (26.3% more deaths than expected), in tune with
the impact of the waves of Covid that were reaching the country
.
In particular, the waves of the first half of 2021, a period in which this “plus” of deaths is strongly concentrated,
reaching 40%
.
Another important fact is that the new Vital Statistics (which the Ministry will publish online this Tuesday) confirm that Covid was consolidated, in that period, as
the leading cause of death in the country
.
To the surprise of many, this includes people over the age of 25 and up to 75. For all of them,
the leading cause of death that year was the coronavirus
.
(News in development)
AS