The peak of deaths registered at the beginning of February seems to have come to an end. Last Thursday, the day on which Uruguay exceeded 700,000 confirmed cases of covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, it also reached its record number of deaths so far in 2022, with 39 deaths. However, in less than a week, The landscape seems to have changed completely.
From the record day almost a week ago No more than 20 daily deaths from the virus have been recorded. Experts are beginning to think that there is a stable trend, which will go down, as happened with the curve of new cases. “We can think that the worst is over, cautiously. I estimate that the wave is going to go down now, which does not mean (that you have to) throw away the flip-flop,” virologist Juan Cristina told El Observador.
The scene of the deathsAlthough it is just beginning it already invites us to think that there will be a “decrease and consolidation” in the short termaccording to the infectologist Julio Medina on his Twitter account.
“There are incipient elements that show how the omicron wave begins to subside. (…) It is expected that the decline and consolidation in the decrease of admissions to CTI and deaths takes longer“, narrowed.
The expert noted that the vaccine protection, added to high percentage of infected population in the last 60 days and drop in effective reproductive rate (R) will favor this decrease. And the numbers, little by little, begin to give him credit.
This Wednesday, the report released by the National Emergency System (Sinae) showed a record identical to that of Tuesday, with 20 new deaths in the last 24 hours, and in the previous days the figure ranged between 12 and 19 deaths.
The Minister of Public Health, Daniel Salinas, had stated in mid-January that Uruguay would experience a drop as of February 15. consulted by The Observer, noted that the decline in active cases (from 86 thousand to 59 thousand in 20 days) It was a self-fulfilling prophecy“, although later he preferred to be something more cautious when referring to deaths: “The deaths they are going to continue because they are almost a month out of date”he maintained and added that it is still hasty to speak of a “frank decline”.
Christinafor his part, agreed with Medina that the “natural evolution of the pandemic” and the strong vaccine shield will help the decline to consolidate. “The waves first go up and then go down. We would have to wait a few more days, but everything indicates that the trend is downward for the wave. That has a lot of different factors: you have a lot more people who got it and they have natural immunity and good vaccination numbers,” he explained.
The specialist compared the evolution of the epidemic in Uruguay with other countries and warned that the development could be similar – as long as new variants do not arise – to that of some European countries.
In his statements to the Doble Click program, Salinas had mentioned South Africa and the United Kingdom as two examples in which the omicron variant had a strong expansion during the weeks after its discovery -and therefore the cases in CTI and deaths increased-, but then it decreased considerably.
“If you ask me if this is the last wave that Uruguay is going to experience, I don’t know.. Vaccination coverage in much of the world is ridiculous; there are countries in which coverage is 6%. My wish is that it be the last one because pandemics always happen, but scientifically there is no evidence. If no other variant arises, everything would indicate that we are in the same situation that some European countries have experiencedsuch as the UK and Denmark, that come down“, he specified.
“Those who were not vaccinated, perhaps already had contact due to the natural evolution of the pandemic and acquired immunity. Today you have a very significant percentage of people recovered, but beware that in this type of infectious agent it is not an immunity that lasts forever. In this period (February) surely all this will produce a suppression of the viral population“, he concluded.
