Brazil may have almost 2 million infected with coronavirus, says USP study | National newspaper

Since Saturday (2), Ricardo has a fever and difficulty breathing. On Wednesday (6) night, he looked for a public hospital in the South Zone of São Paulo. His father-in-law tells how it was. ”

“The doctor did not specify, did not perform any tests to detect that it is Covid. He only suspected. And he passed the medications. He said that tests are lacking in the entire network,” says Ronaldo Rodrigues. “As they recommended, I am isolated,” says Ricardo.

Your case is not included in the statistics. The Ministry and Health Departments of the states and municipalities only count confirmed cases, those in which people did tests that proved infection with the new coronavirus. It turns out that Brazil tests very little.

The tests in Brazil are mainly for hospitalized patients and health and safety professionals. Many people with mild or even no symptoms do not know if they have or had Covid-19 and do not appear in the statistics. A study by the University of São Paulo (USP) indicates that the actual number of cases can be 14 times the official number.

The study, carried out at the USP School of Medicine in Ribeirão Preto, in the interior of São Paulo, uses South Korea, one of the countries that performs the most tests for Covid-19, as a reference. Therefore, the numbers there, according to the researchers, are much closer to reality.

The epidemic in South Korea started earlier than in Brazil, and the number of new cases there is slowing. But when the country was at the same point in the epidemic Brazil is in today, 1.65% of infected South Koreans died from Covid-19, Brazilian researchers noted. They applied this same fatality rate to Brazil, adjusting the calculation according to the age differences of our population in relation to the South Koreans and, therefore, based on the number of deaths, they calculated what the actual number of infected people would be.

In a graph developed by the study, the lower line shows the evolution of the number of cases in the country by official data and the upper line, by the study estimate. This Thursday (7), when the Ministry of Health represented 135 thousand cases of Covid-19 in Brazil, the study pointed to more than 1.9 million.

It is more than the total number of cases in the United States, the country most affected by the pandemic. And look at that one of the numbers used in the calculations, that of the dead in Brazil, is also smaller than the real one. Many people are being buried without confirming whether the cause of death was Covid-19.

“If I take into account the number of deaths that are effective, when trying to make an estimate, excluding underreporting, my model, honestly, explodes with the number of cases. This model is optimistic and, therefore, I have argued that Brazil, necessarily, for the world, is already the main focus of the epidemic, “said Domingos Alves, professor at the Ribeirão Preto School of Medicine (USP).

The projections have a margin of error more or less. This margin indicates that, at the limit, Brazil today would have at least 1.5 million cases and, at most, more than 2 million cases of Covid-19.

The researcher argues that it is time to further tighten the isolation measures: “These measures that have been adopted have not had the proper effect. And what we are seeing is an important escape from the hand of governments to control this pandemic” . , the population that is already exhausted by this situation, must understand that it is the following: the tightening of containment measures, in most Brazilian capitals, will save lives. Many lives. ”

The Ministry of Health has stated that it is discussing with the states the need to report suspected and confirmed Covid cases; that, due to the characteristics of the disease and the lack of evidence worldwide, underreporting is expected. The ministry says it is following the guidance of the World Health Organization to evaluate as many people as possible, so it plans to buy 46 million tests, corresponding to 22% of the population.