Despite having caused fewer deaths compared to previous strains, Ômicron was responsible for a high rate of hospitalizations in the country’s Intensive Care Units (ICU), as released this Tuesday (15) by MonitoraCovid-19, a Fiocruz panel. that follows the developments of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil.
The expansion of the new strain generated a strong impact on health services in 2022 and led to risks of lack of assistance to the population, especially for those who developed more severe symptoms of the disease.
The researchers pointed out that there was a “significant volume” of deaths that occurred outside the ICUs, which, according to those responsible for the study, “denotes the occurrence of a situation of lack of health care in the population”, especially in regions with lower vaccination rates.
“Lack of assistance is the worst situation within an epidemic context, as it reflects the collapse of the health system and a context in which people do not have the bare minimum, which is the care they need to attend.
Lack of assistance also causes indirect deaths from other causes that cannot be addressed, with this increasing the excess of deaths caused by the epidemic, which adds up to deaths from both Covid-19 and other causes”, warned the researchers in the published technical note.
The study pointed out that, in January of this year, almost all the states in the country had a peak of hospitalizations that resembled those caused by the first strains of the coronavirus, in 2020, and also in relation to the peaks caused by the Delta and Gamma variants, at the same time. over the past year.
Current numbers, however, could be even higher.
Fiocruz researchers pointed out that the digital attack against the Ministry of Health (MS) database may have interfered with the calculation.
“The blackout causes a delay in the disclosure of data and there is still information that will enter the next balance sheets. The data released this Tuesday (15) refer to the first week of February. So it is possible that the situation could be worse in the next bulletin”, said Diego Xavier, a researcher at MonitoraCovid-19.
unequal vaccination
The researchers also indicated that one of the main current problems of the pandemic is the uneven coverage of vaccination in the country. The study observed that while states such as São Paulo have high coverage rates, others, especially some in the North and Northeast regions, have rates considered low for both the booster dose and the two doses.
“According to the data, it is possible to correlate the increase in hospitalizations and ICU cases to the fact that a still large part of the Brazilian population has not completed their vaccination schedule against Covid-19, that is, an epidemic of unvaccinated”, informs excerpt from the published technical note.
Diego Xavier warns that for every 10 people hospitalized with Covid-19, eight to nine have delayed vaccination. In addition, the researcher says that vaccinated people who develop serious conditions as a result of the virus are mostly elderly and with comorbidities.
Unvaccinated people, on the other hand, do not follow a pattern by age group in relation to the evolution of the disease.
Xavier ends by saying that people, especially public managers, need to understand that Covid-19 is here to stay and that it will be necessary to assimilate and plan to live with this virus.
“We need to learn to live with this disease. We will not return to normality and things will not be as they were before. We always need to focus on preventing new cases to have less and less pressure on health services. Only in this way will we avoid serious cases and, consequently, more deaths. Managers need to pay attention to indicators and take more energetic measures when necessary. We have to have prior planning in case we have to face a new variant as aggressive as the ones we are seeing, so that the population has adequate care”, he concluded.
Source: CNN Brasil
