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The northern region may reach seven thousand new cases of contagion by SARS-CoV-2 next week, experts warned this Wednesday, specifying that there are “several counties” at a “level similar to the three of Tâmega and Sousa, where they were imposed. measurements”. more restricted.
In statements to Lusa, Milton Severo, head of the projections of the Institute of Public Health of the University of Porto (ISPUP), said that, if the forecasts are maintained, the North region could “reach seven thousand new cases” of contagion with the new coronavirus. and achieve 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 between 1.2 and 1.6), which means a growth every five days of 40%, which is quite high, being the North and Central regions have the highest values ”, explained the researcher.
Óscar Felgueiras, a mathematician specializing in epidemiology at the University of Porto, said that in the North there are “several counties” 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 the 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 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 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 amounts 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”.
Following this path, Óscar Felgueiras outlines 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 of “there are days with more than four thousand” new infections due to the new coronavirus, which causes the covid-19. “I would very much like this week’s forecast to fail because it was a sign that, in fact, something would be 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 “.
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 in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
