The expansion of the coronavirus is accelerating in the United States, where almost a quarter of the world’s cases are registered, while President Donald Trump continues to be reluctant to take confinement measures across the country.
Should? As long as there are no vaccines or group immunity, only containment measures (confinement, social distancing, etc.) are effective in reducing the speed at which the virus is transmitted, reminds Univision News Juan Alonso-Echanove, an epidemiologist and former Officer from the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.
What should be the intensity of those measures? “It depends on the country’s ability to implement an active surveillance system, capable of identifying, confirming, analyzing, investigating and containing suspected cases,” said this expert. South Korea is an example of good work in terms of focused intervention with massive tests, geolocation of people and confinement of the infected and their contacts.
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“If a system like this does not exist,” says Echanove, “the confinement of large block communities is necessary,” he says. “The earlier they are put in place and the more restrictive these measures are, the faster transmission will be controlled.” Alonso-Echanove believes that several waves of transmission of the virus are likely to occur, and each should be treated in the same way: with containment measures to avoid saturation of the health system. “The duration and intensity of these measures will be determined by the increasing group immunity, the strength of the surveillance system (the ability to detect and isolate cases), the capacity of the health system and, of course, political criteria,” he says. this epidemiologist.
This is a review of what is happening in other parts of the world:
Nature on the streets: wild animals (and others not so much) roam cities deserted by the coronavirus
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