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The northern region could reach seven thousand new cases of covid-19 next week, experts warn, realizing that there are “several counties” at a “similar level” to the three of Tâmega and Sousa, where measures were imposed more restrictive.
Milton Severo, head of the projections of the Institute of Public Health of the University of Porto (ISPUP), told the Lusa agency this Wednesday that, if the forecasts are maintained, the North region could “reach seven thousand new cases” . “infection rate 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 40% growth every five days, which is quite high, being the North and Central regions have the highest values ”, explained the researcher.
Óscar Felgueiras, a mathematician specialized in epidemiology at the University of Porto, said that in the North there are “several municipalities” that are “at 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,” the mathematician stressed, giving the municipalities of Vizela, Peñafiel, Paredes and Porto as an example.
According to ISPUP researcher Milton Severo, although mathematical models are “like weather predictions”, since they depend on the “variability of what will happen”, they indicate about eight thousand daily cases of new infections in Portugal in the first week of November, of which seven thousand in the North, with hospitalizations in the country ranging between 2,500 and 3,000, and the number of patients in intensive care units will amount to around 300.
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 implemented measures “had an effective reduction in RT”.
If this trajectory continues, Óscar Felgueiras outlines a scenario of, on average, 3,500 new cases per day during this week for the Northern region and does not rule out the hypothesis that “there are more than 4,000 days.” “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,” said the mathematician.
Asked if changes were noted in the models during the measures implemented by the Government to mitigate the evolution of the pandemic, Óscar Felgueiras stated that, despite “a small improvement”, this “is not enough to leave the range of forecasts statistics “.
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