Rio de Janeiro started the year 2022 with a significantly worse scenario than the month of December. However, at the same time that the positivity rate for people who take the Covid-19 test soared, the search for vaccines also grew 56% in the capital of Rio de Janeiro.
In the last working days of 2021 (December 27th to 31st), the average number of people vaccinated per day at the city’s health posts was 31,000. In the first two days of open centers to vaccinate people in 2022 (January 3rd and 4th), the average surpassed 48,000 people. The data for this Wednesday (5) are not yet available, but it is already possible to say that at least 1,852 people who had not taken even the first dose made the decision to take the immunizing agent after the turn of the year.
If in the last week of 2021, for every 100 people who tested positive for coronavirus in the city of Rio de Janeiro, 13 had a positive result, in the first days of 2022 the group of people more than tripled, to 41 in every 100. In practice , the positivity grew 215% among those tested, or 28 percentage points – a rise that has been registered day after day since the eve of the New Year. The data are from the Covid-19 Panel, from the Municipal Health Department. The number of positive responses among those tested is the highest since January 2021.
Data from the Rio State Health Department show that the increase in test positivity is also reflected in a ‘boom’ of cases. The daily average of infected in the state sixfolded after the turn of the year. Over the entire month of December 2021, 8,008 cases were recorded, an average of 258 per day. This year, data show that 6,551 people were diagnosed with Covid-19, an average of 1,637 per day.
The biggest concern of health professionals, the number of hospitalizations, does not yet show significant variation in the public network, but there is already a worrying increase in at least part of private hospitals.
Rede D’Or São Luiz
Data from monitoring panels on the epidemiological situation both in the state and in the municipality show that the public hospital network in Rio de Janeiro has not yet felt the impact of the increase in cases. The largest private hospital network in the country, however, is already facing a new scenario.
With 63 hospitals, Rede D’Or São Luiz confirmed the CNN that, in less than a month, admissions of Covid-19 patients jumped 126% in São Paulo and 206% in Rio de Janeiro. On December 6th, the network had 96 inpatients. Now there are 217: more than double. In Rio de Janeiro, on December 23, just before Christmas, 15 people were hospitalized with coronaviruses in the network’s units. This Wednesday the number reached 46, more than triple.
Experts attribute the case boom to the Ômicron variant. The infectious disease specialist Ricardo Diaz fears that a very significant increase in the number of cases will lead to an escalation of hospitalizations, even with the milder impact profile of this mutation. “Ômicron is more transmissible and appears to have a lower capacity to cause serious illness. Perhaps Ômicron’s ability to cause serious illness is midway between the common cold and flu viruses, but below the Covid-19 variants that came before it,” he says.
“Anyway, when a lot of people are infected, the chance of finding cases that are more serious and that require hospitalization increases a lot. The ‘little’ ends up being a lot. This makes us afraid that our health system will again not be able to serve people who need hospitalization and ICU in the future”, warns the doctor.
Reference: CNN Brasil
