ICUs will soon start feeling the decrease in hospitalizations

During this week Catalan hospitals begin to hospitalize less coronavirus patients. It is still a very slow decrease, which does not remove the danger of the always feared resurgence, but it does venture that the number of patients admitted to critical care units is about to change. "Between this weekend and early next week will reach the ICUs peak admissions" of this third wave, Enric Alvarez, a researcher at the Biocomsc group of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), predicts, who forecasts the future behavior of the pandemic from the analysis of health data.

For the moment, however, the number of ICUs admissions has been growing every day for a month. Thursday (day of the latest data) there were 718 patients, 12 more than the day before. There is no room for relaxation of habits or protection, experts warn, when Catalonia has exceeded 19,000 deaths and the next update of data will reach half a million infections since the pandemic began. So much so, that non-urgent interventions susceptible to need ICUs have been deprogrammed to avoid the collapse of the first wave of spring. If there are more critically ill patients, where does the timid optimism come from? From the fact that for the last 12 days many of the indicators have been slowing down, even though they are going more slowly than during the decrease of the second wave. Therefore, the pandemic pattern predicts that the progressive and continuous reduction of new infections is followed by a respite in hospital admissions and, after a few days, relief begins to be felt in ICU wards.

Diagnosed cases have been reduced in the last week to 3,631 and, in parallel, the R number and the EPG have also seen a small but significant drop. As for the first indicator, the ability of the coronavirus to spread is now 0.95, that is, below 1, which is the point that marks the decrease of the pandemic. Translated into plain language, this means that for every 100 new cases, 95 people are infected. The incidence per 100,000 inhabitants (the EPG) is also decreasing in comparison with two weeks ago, down to 573 points.

The projections of the evolution of the pandemic reflect that the third wave in hospitals has already reached its peak, comparing it to those admitted to the ward on January 24. In this last week the number of people admitted has gone down and every day there have been a few less. "It is a very slow pace but once there has been the peak of hospitalizations, everything suggests that the same thing will happen in the ICUs," Alvarez says, and stresses that the last indicator to notice this trend of improvement will be the number of deaths.

It is clear that in this third wave mortality has been higher than in the previous two. In the last seven days there have been 552 deaths -79 per day on average-, a high figure that has not been seen since the first week of May, when the first wave was already deflating. Another indicator that shows this virulence is that the peak of deaths accumulated in a single week during the second wave - the first in November - was a maximum of 508 deaths.

The irruption of the British variant may provoke new outbreaks

"We cannot lower our guard because at any time the data can shoot up again", the researcher of the UPC warns, who highlights that critical units are, as for today, very full and, therefore, a new rebound could lead to their collapse.

However, in the face of this panorama of improvement of the indicators is the threat of the irruption of the British variant of covid-19. For now, its presence is residual but every day more cases are found, and the Secretary General of Health, Josep Maria Argimon, estimated that it may be the predominant "in five or six weeks", ie, that its incidence may be more than half of the diagnosed cases. Argimon spoke of an "unknown" to refer to how the incidence of this mutation can be translated. However, Enric Alvarez believes that it can change trends and again shoot up the cases with a new outbreak or wave. The variant is more transmissible and, therefore, the more contagions are recorded, more hospital involvement there will be.

As for vaccines, the slow pace of immunization due to the problems of pharmaceuticals to provide the product has caused that the initially planned schedule is not being met, although the new Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, maintains that in summer 70% of the citizens of the State will have received two doses of the vaccine and herd immunity will be achieved. The current data lowers the enthusiasm of the minister because in Catalonia only 0.5% of the population has received both injections.