Covid indicators rise, hospital admissions increase
Hospitals received 52 patients in the last hours and three more were admitted to the ICU, where there are already 410 beds occupied
BarcelonaCovid indicators continue to rise one more day, with the Easter holidays at the corner and while the vaccination campaign has not quite caught pace. Catalonia is registering about 1,050 infections of coronavirus a week on average -190 positive per 100,000 inhabitants during the last 14 days - and the rebound of the data coincides with the relaxation of some restrictions deployed two weeks ago, such as allowing the hospitality industry to serve until 5 PM and the recovery of classroom activities in educational settings. Some "small openings" that health authorities defend as a tool to reduce social tension.
"We need to breathe, we all need it from the social, emotional and economic point of view", said Friday the Secretary of Public Health, Josep Maria Argimon. And for that reason, from last Monday on, the regional lockdown has been lifted for cohabitation bubbles and nonessential shops can reopen during weekends. The slight growth of the indicators was therefore predictable: the more air, the more social interaction and therefore the greater the risk of increased transmission of the virus. Now the goal is to know if it will be a temporary and controllable increase or if it will be the prelude to a fourth wave, as has happened in other European countries such as France and Italy, so far with figures much higher than the Catalan ones.
The head of section of the Infectious Diseases Service of the Hospital del Mar, Robert Güerri, warned on Sunday that the country is heading towards a fourth wave. "Whenever we go after the virus the situation gets out of control", he said in an interview with Tv3. The infectologist has asked the authorities not to repeat the same mistakes that were made at the end of the year to save Christmas now that Easter is approaching and indicators have already increased. "The third wave was created by us, in December", he insisted. Güerri also stressed that the dominance of the British variant further complicates the scenario, since not only it is transmitted better but could have 30% more mortality than the original. This could explain why hospitals are taking so long to empty despite the three months of social sacrifices.
Data on the rise
Right now the R number, which calculates the speed of spread of the virus and serves to monitor whether the pandemic is entering an expansion phase, is already above the threshold of 1. This means that each positive person is infecting on average another person and that the chains of transmission are not being cut with sufficient agility. The optimal situation would require this figure to be between 0.5 and 0.8, at most, but in Catalonia it is almost always kept between 0.85 and 0.95.
The great thermometer of the pandemic, the hospital pressure, also does not loosen, and has experienced a small increase this weekend. In the last few hours 52 more covid patients have been admitted to the hospital, which raise the number of those hospitalized in wards to 1,406, and there have been three more admissions in the intensive care units (ICU), where there are still 410 patients only because of the virus.
Hospital occupancy is that what worries the Department of Health the most, because it is estimated that with each new onslaught of the virus about 400 patients are admitted to intensive care. With such a high base figure of 400, the authorities fear that a fourth wave would now collapse health centres with more than 800 patients.
5% of tests are positive
The positivity rate is another indicator that has increased in the last three days. According to the document Public Health Criteria for covid-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) establishes that the total number of PCRs that are made and are positive does not have to exceed the threshold of 5% to consider that a country has managed to have the pandemic under control. Until now, Catalonia had managed to keep this indicator below 5%, but at the moment it is already at 5.10% with respect to the 161,571 tests that are done weekly.
The EPG is also approaching the threshold of 200 points. It is a very interesting indicator to monitor the explosion of a new wave during the next 14 days, and alarms are triggered from the moment its value exceeds 100. Now the figure stands at 198 points and triples the values considered safe (between 30 and 70).
The only indicator that remains stable is the number of deaths, partly because care homes, which have accounted for more than a third of deaths during the pandemic, are almost entirely protected by the vaccine.
During the twelve weeks of the vaccination campaign, the Health Department has given 1,008,712 doses of the three available vaccines -Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca-, of which 663,978 correspond to first doses. Today, 344,734 people have received the two doses and have completed the vaccination schedule. In the last 24 hours, according to information from dadescovid.cat, 415 first doses and 1,303 second doses have been administered.
