which are the most and least contagious neighborhoods

If there is second hello from Covid-19 It sounds like deja vu, it’s a fast move. Not only is the contagion rate higher: its distribution over the entire territory is also Faster. This reveals the first analyzes of coronavirus infections in the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires which, unlike the first wave, did not take long this time to reach the whole city in a more or less uniform manner.

Last year, when the emergence of new strains still looked like science fiction, the virus first appeared in the city’s northern and central neighborhoods, then more concentrated in Retiro and flowers, largely because of the fireplaces in villas 31 and 1-11-14.

From June, the transmission began to condense in the south of Buenos Aires, and already in September it returned to the center in the geographic center of the city, precisely the area more densely populated.

The level of contagion was matched in October and a soft gray shade began to reign over the map of Buenos Aires. This uniformity which took more than six months to produce it’s happened much faster now, in line with the great speed with which infections occur at this stage. In a few weeks, the second wave spread throughout the city.

“Today there are no strong traces of contagion but a large number of cases but distributed. The patch which had formed with the peak of December and January was distributed in the districts and there was a kind of homogenization ”, analyzes Gabriel Battistella, under-secretary for primary, ambulatory and community care of the ministry of the Health of the City.

It seems an accelerated version of what happened in the first wave: in the current one we see how the northern districts were the first to increase the cases, followed by those in the south. The incidence then concentrated around the geographic center of the city, to later become uniform.

However, in this second wave, there were no peaks of cases in villas and retirement homes as in the first. In fact, in cities, cases are increasing at a slower rate than in the rest of the city, according to official data.

“It’s not that there are fewer tests, but of course 42% seroprevalence is an important factor, because that’s the protection that disease generates, ”says Battistella.

Refers to the percentage of villagers already vaccinated at the end of the year, while in formal neighborhoods, such as Palermo or Recoleta, vaccination has not reached 3%. The data come from the survey prepared by the Ministry of Health of Buenos Aires and the Department of Statistics and Censuses.

The most infected neighborhoods

These days, the neighborhoods that added the most infections were La Boca, San Nicolás, Puerto Madero and Villa Riachuelo, who exceeded the 100 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants based on the moving average of the past seven days. At the opposite extreme are Retiro, Agronomía, Belgrano and Saavedra, with less than 70 new positives per day.

Data, provided by the city’s health ministry, were graphically represented and mapped by the site CovidStats.com.ar, by engineer and statistical student Mauro Infantino. They show that with the exception of La Boca and San Nicolás in the lead, the districts of Buenos Aires do not differ significantly from each other in terms of new cases in number of inhabitants. On the contrary, the neighborhood ranking of the rate of contagion is seen as a gradient of a few units or decimal places of difference each time.

The same tendency is observed when looking at the neighborhood through neighborhood curves drawn on the Infantino website as well as on the networks of data analyst and biochemist Santiago Olszevicki. The lines showing the rise and fall of daily cases draw similar pictures, with a very slight drop at the end.

This would explain the current small drop in R Zero, the level of contagiousness of the virus, which, according to the Buenos Aires health portfolio, is today 1.02. The number may come as a surprise, given the very high number of new cases every day, but it is because the R Zero is more about the rise of the curve than its height.

This is how there can be a plateau, high, but finally a plateau. In recent days, the number of daily infections has remained at similar values, instead of continuing to increase as it has in recent weeks.

“If you look optimistically, this may be a sketch towards a small decline with a high number of cases. If this happened and infections started to drop, we are not spared a third wave, even if it would be with a more vaccinated population – warns Battistella -. Either way, we still need to know what will happen when it cools off ”.

SC