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The northern region could reach 7,000 new cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection next week, experts warned this Wednesday, specifying that there are “several counties” at a “level similar to the three in Tâmega and Sousa, where stricter measures were imposed.
Speaking to the Lusa agency, Milton Severo, head of the projections of the Institute of Public Health of the University of Porto (ISPUP), said this Wednesday that, if the forecasts are maintained, the North region could “reach 7,000 new cases” . of infection by SARS-CoV-2 and reach a transmissibility index (the so-called RT) of 1.6.
“When we look at the effective RT, we continue more or less as we were last week, with an effective RT of 1.4 (ranging from 1.2 to 1.6), which means a growth every five days of 40%, which is quite high, with the North and Center regions having the highest values“Clarified the researcher.
Óscar Felgueiras, a mathematician specialized in epidemiology at the University of Porto, said that in the North there are “Multiple counties” that are “on a similar level” to the municipalities of Felgueiras, Paços de Ferreira and Lousada, where more restrictive measures were implemented to contain the pandemic.
“There are several municipalities that have very high incidences and it would be perfectly natural for there to be an expansion of measures taking into account the evolution of the situation,” stressed the mathematician, giving as an example the municipalities of Vizela, Peñafiel, Paredes and Oporto.
According to the ISPUP researcher, Milton Severo, although the mathematical models are “like weather forecasts”, since they depend on the “variability of what will happen”, they point to about 8,000 daily cases of new infections in Portugal in the first week of November, of which 7,000 to the north, with hospitalizations in the country that vary between 2,500 and 3,000 and the number of patients in intensive care units reaching around 300.
7,000 daily cases in the north? “In the worst case. In the best case, we would reach 3 or 4 thousand” in 10 days
Even so, Milton Severo pointed out that the transmissibility rate “in the first wave of the disease was much higher” (having reached 2.5) and that this reflects that the measures implemented “had an effective reduction in RT”.
If this trajectory continues, Óscar Felgueiras draws a scenario of, on average, 3,500 new cases per day during this week for the North region and does not rule out the hypothesis that “there are days with more than 4,000” new infections due to the new coronavirus, which causes COVID-19.
I would very much like this week’s forecast to fail because it was a sign that, in fact, something was changing, but I still don’t see that reflected in the models.
Asked if changes in the models were noticed during the measures implemented by the Government to mitigate the evolution of the pandemic, Óscar Felgueiras stated that, despite “a small improvement”, such “It is not enough to leave the range of statistical forecasts.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has already claimed more than 1.1 million deaths and more than 43.5 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report by the French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 2,371 people died from 124,432 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate General of Health.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected at the end of December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
