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The country this Sunday marks six months of the arrival of the pandemic with 21,156 confirmed deaths and 658,456 infections. And it’s been a week since the quarantine ended and the so-called new normal began, which is nothing more than an attempt to return to routine amid strict protocols.
The scenes of the last days give an account of this. There are more traffic jams and people took to the streets.
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The Government made the decision to end the quarantine under the premise that the country has already exceeded its peak of daily cases and deaths, as confirmed by the National Administrative Department of Statistics (Dane) when revealing that in week 30 (between 20 and July 26), Colombia reached the point of maximum mortality of covid-19. Since then there has been a sustained decline in this indicator.
Despite this, several sectors have warned of a potential risk of re-outbreak as a result of the reopening, as happened in Spain, which last Friday, with 4,503, had the highest number of new infections in four months.
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The Colombian Association of Critical Medicine and Intensive Care (Amci) presented the Ministry of Health with considerations about the so-called new reality. In a statement, he stated that despite all the gains in terms of response capacity, “the pandemic is not under control and epidemiological information may underestimate reality.”
The intensivists pointed out that the interaction of infected people with vulnerable “in a scenario of lack of consciousness, individual and collective, poses a high risk of contagion.” And they mentioned several situations that concern them, such as that the circulation of the virus persists, the ‘boomerang effect’, which has increased the use of ICU by other pathologies neglected in quarantine, and the “shortage” of human talent trained for these attentions, according to the president of this union, José Luis Accini.
In contrast, the Ministry of Health has highlighted that the reopening is supported by the achievements of the quarantine that allowed the containment of the virus. And an example of this is that the effective reproductive number of infections (Rt) went from 2.28 at the beginning of the pandemic to 1.11 today. The rate of doubling of cases has slowed down and today it is happening every 29 days. And the fatality went from being close to 5 percent to 3.18 percent.
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And in parallel, the intensive care units (ICU) managed to expand by 89 percent, after going from 5,346 beds to 10,115.
Concern
But the concern of the new peaks is not exclusive to intensivist physicians. José Fernando Galván, vice dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the National University of Colombia, told this newspaper that the so-called new normal carries with it the risk of increasing infections. According to projections of the District Health Secretariat, if the protocols are not applied correctly, at the end of October or beginning of November, Bogotá would require some 2,800 ICU beds, figure that would exceed the installed capacity (1,850). Likewise, about 9,000 cases will require general hospital care.
On the other hand, Galván explains, if people comply with all the care measures, “the approaching peak would imply 6,000 cases of general hospitalization and 1,700 of intensive care, which will not exceed the installed capacity” of the city.
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For this reason, Galván is emphatic that citizens must be clear that the virus is still present and “the new normal does not mean that the pandemic is over.”
Added to that is the arrival of the second respiratory peak in the country. The rainy season normally increases the cases of acute respiratory infections (ARI) as a consequence of the affectation of 15 different viruses to the new coronavirus and that can be just as aggressive.
New peaks?
Martha Ospina, director of the National Institute of Health (INS), is firm in saying that The country cannot yet speak of outbreaks because the initial curve of infections and deaths has not yet finished falling. “We are at the top of the curve, we have just been going down and the measures are precisely to continue going down. There is no regrowth because this has not decreased ”, he told EL TIEMPO.
Luis Jorge Hernández, doctor in Public Health and professor at the Universidad de los Andes, states that in this case, a different behavior of the pandemic is expected: “In the case of Spain, the average age of the people affected in the first peak or wave was 67 years and in the second, 37 to 40 years. In Colombia, due to the openness, epidemic outbreaks may occur in several places. However, if mitigation measures are done well – such as masks, hand washing and physical distance – this risk is lower ”.
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We are at the top of the curve, we have just been going down and the measures are precisely to continue going down. There is no regrowth because this has not come down
The key, he says, is to comply with all mitigation measures and make gradual openings. “Likewise, PCR tests should be increased in the population with high street mobility,” he concluded.
For his part, Carlos Álvarez, national coordinator of covid-19 studies for the World Health Organization (WHO), indicated that “The impact of this regrowth and when it could occur will depend on compliance with the isolation measures. This is not the time to lower our guard ”, he claimed.
Finally, Carlos Eduardo Pérez, infectologist at the National University, insists that, “although no one is certain, it is likely that in November we will see a new increase in cases.”
Latin America has 25% of the dead
Although Latin America has less than 10 percent of the world’s population, the deaths that have been registered by the covid-19 pandemic are 25 percent of the total. AND, at that rate, the region could add 495,000 deaths in December.
That is the main conclusion reached this week by a group of researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), located at the University of Washington (United States).
Currently, 43 percent of the deaths that occur every day in the world from the new coronavirus live in Latin America. Everything points to this being the leading cause of death in the region by the end of the year, above all other diseases and external causes.
Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and other research centers confirm that, although there are asymmetries in the results, the region continues to be the focus of the pandemic.
(Read also: ‘This virus shows how vulnerable we are’: Peter C. Doherty)
In fact, this part of the world accumulates more than seven million positive cases and 280,000 deaths. Brazil concentrates more than 30 percent of the deceased and almost half of the infections in the region. It is followed by Peru, with more than 676,000 infections and 29,000 deaths from covid-19.
For its part, Colombia moved to third place in the number of infections, with almost 660,000, and more than 21,000 deaths. As for Mexico, the country exceeded 623,000 cases and more than 66,000 deaths. This is the fourth in the world in terms of deaths from the pandemic, according to the daily count made by Johns Hopkins University.
All this while Most of the countries of the continent began a new reality this month, marked by government decisions to resume economic activities.
For now, the authorities are optimistic and base their decisions on seeing that on the continent there are more than 5.2 million recovered against 1.1 million active cases, which suggests that the critical part of the pandemic is being left behind , although the ghost of the new waves of contagion continues to haunt. Therefore, PAHO insists on maintaining the measures, even if some numbers are temporarily favorable.
HEALTH UNIT
