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It depends on who to ask. Gabriela Gomes, epidemiologist, researcher at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the Center for Research in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources at the University of Porto, is already “in the second wave” because “The epidemic, having been repeated for some time, after a certain time began to grow again sustained incidence of the disease ”.
But not all experts agree with that. Miguel Castanho, principal investigator of the Institute of Molecular Medicine, had already shared with the Observer that, in his opinion, we are only seeing “dynamic fluctuations of the same phenomenon”: “It will only be justified to speak in a second wave when something radically different happens, something that allows us to say that one person had Covid-19 and the other had Covid-20; or where there is an increase in the number of cases that is clearly a new stage in terms of infection ”.
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In an interview with The Observer in August, Pasi Penttinen, an immunization specialist at the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), even said that “I would avoid using the dichotomy of the first and second waves”: “We are in the middle of the first wave in Europe and worldwide. We only saw declines [no número de casos] in Europe, due to physical distance measurements. The virus did not change the dynamics. The moment we relax these measures, opportunities will be created for the virus to spread again, ”he replied.
It is a dynamic that Manuel Carmo Gomes also described to the Observer in an interview in August. According to him, disease wave patterns “essentially depend on the number of people who are susceptible to disease”. In the case of infectious agents that infect many people rapidly, the number of people who can contract the disease decreases rapidly, and neither the number of births nor the number of people who lose immunity can replace the susceptible population; then an epidemic occurs. But in the case of diseases that infect a few people or more slowly, the number of infected people remains more stable over time.
Covid-19 is caused by a virus capable of infecting many people quickly, that is, it fits in the first case. However, there are still many people susceptible to being infected with the new coronavirus, since a large part of the population went into confinement, fulfilled the physical distance and, subsequently, began to wear a mask and adopt new habits of respiratory hygiene.
Therefore, when some of these measures began to be lifted, the number of infected also increased again. Thus the first wave did not have a sudden peak that spread everywhere and had a very large decline, touching the daily zeros. “We had a spike, but with the blur, the virus found conditions to spread again. Right now we are in the first wave, in the middle of the fight, looking for a balance: the number of new cases does not decrease much, but it does not increase much either ”, defended Miguel Castanho.
This is how the epidemiologist also justifies the increase in cases in recent days: there will have been a “behavior change” in the population in recent weeks This caused an “increase in contacts” or a lower capacity to comply with the care recommended by the health authorities. Although it is not an “uncontrolled” increase, it is “unexpected”.
