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Colombia is close to adding its first million confirmed infected with the new coronavirus and 30,000 deaths from covid-19. It will be a matter of hours for the country to reach these figures. And if nothing changes Public health experts say that by December 31 the number of deaths could reach 40,000, a level that for many was unthinkable at the beginning of the pandemic and for official projections, a scenario that had to be avoided.
This was stated in June by the director of the National Institute of Health (INS), Martha Ospina, when contextualizing an official response that her entity and the Ministry sent to the Constitutional Court in which projections of the impact of Sars-CoV-2 were made at the end of the year.
At that time, the authorities affirmed that if the pandemic did not modify the indicators it had when the first easing of the quarantine was made on April 27 (effective reproductive number of 1.37) There could be 41,622 deaths from covid-19 in Colombia by December 31, in a range of 15,115 to 55,411.
Ospina emphasized then that the measures taken in the framework of the emergency – such as quarantine, closures and suspension of land and air transportation – were precisely to avoid that reality shown by the models. “Whether the figures are smaller or distant or prolonged in time will depend on the decisions we make”, He said.
(Also read: What is known about the death of a volunteer in the Oxford vaccine for covid)
When those projections were revealed, academics like Luis Jorge Hernández, a doctor of public health, called the estimates “apocalyptic.” But the truth is that the dynamics of the pandemic are today on the way to fulfill them.
Other models
In September, after three months of INS projections and a few weeks after the country surpassed its death peak, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (Ihme), an independent organization of the University of Washington, presented its own projections of the impact of the pandemic by the end of this year.
For Colombia, the Ihme projected that under the conditions of that moment (the quarantine and other restrictions had already ended) 43,564 deaths could be registered by covid-19 on December 31, and in the worst case scenario (full relaxation of measures such as use of masks and social distance) they could reach up to 78,302.
That budget of more than 43,000 deaths was twice the number officially recorded by the country in the first week of September and almost triple the lower limit set by the INS in June.
Today, with updated data, the Ihme estimates that there may be 39,754 deaths (range from 36,985 to 42,486).
(You may be interested: Is Fernando Gaviria’s second positive for covid a reinfection?)
What happens today
Colombia reached its peak of deaths last July 30. That day 358 people died from covid-19 in the country. From that date, the deaths that occurred each day from the virus began to fall, to the point that a month and a half later they were located in the middle (178 on September 12).
The first fortnight of September marked the beginning of a plateau of deaths that has remained above 150 per day, except for October 7 (130), which has sustained the mortality of the pandemic advancing at a doubling rate of 67 days , according to Ourworldindata.
(See: Covid-19 caused 20% of all deaths in the country from March to October)
What’s coming
What is worrying, as projected by the Ministry of Health, is that the pandemic could bring a second wave of infections to the country in late November and early December, which could increase the figures for this mortality plateau.
Martha Ospina, director of the INS, told this newspaper that her new estimates, based on a current national reproductive number of 1, there are between 33,000 and 35,000 total deaths at the end of the year and that, again, the idea is to try to reduce them.
“The epidemic has been explained by the existing mathematical model so that the deceased could reach up to 55,000. However, the observed behavior and the effect of the measures taken allow estimating that more or less there will be 33,000 to 35,000 deaths,” he explained. Ospina.
And he added: “The initial measures showed their clear benefits in the number of deceased. However, with the change of measures towards those that require greater individual commitment, a slowdown in the decline of the deceased was seen, maintaining the trend in a kind of plateau”.
(We recommend: Colombia is approaching one million infections, how is it going in front of the world?)
The infectologist Carlos Álvarez, national coordinator of covid-19 studies for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), however, considers it feasible that the country will reach 40,000 deaths in the 70 days remaining to 2020. His colleague Carlos Pérez believes that a possible number can be 35,000, but the former Minister of Health Gabriel Riveros estimates in 15,000 additional deaths from covid-19 to December 31.
The truth is that if one takes into account that in the last 40 days the pandemic has left a daily average of 150 deaths, the symbolic barrier of 40,000 does not seem far off. Colombia, according to Johns Hopkins, ranks 17th in deaths per million inhabitants (577), while it remains in seventh place with the most confirmed cases, in a context of decline in its first wave of the pandemic.
HEALTH UNIT
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