seven out of ten intensive care beds are already occupied in the AMBA

By some estimates, eight out of ten infected people suffer from the disease with mild symptoms, with only a few days of fever and some physical discomfort; during this time, 15% will need medical care and hospitalization, and the remaining 5% will end up in intensive care units.

On average 20,000 confirmed cases, these percentages would indicate that about a thousand patients per day have to spend a period in ICU due to the severity of the disease. For health statistics, the key is the number of patients entering and the number leaving from a limited number of available beds.

In this context, the Ministry of Health of the Nation reports today that there are 3,761 people hospitalized in intensive care units throughout the country. The percentage of occupancy of adult beds is 59.3% nationally.

But in the metropolitan area of ​​Buenos Aires, where the most concentrated urban areas and the largest number of population are concentrated, the problem is getting worse: 68.1 percent of beds have that uses them. In other words, seven out of ten available.

This explains why there are sectors of the health system – public and private – which They demand more drastic measures than those adopted this week by the national government: they want to avoid what is happening in other countries of the continent and the world, where the health system has collapsed.

With more than 8,000 cases per day and nearly 20 million inhabitants, the Chilean health system is already “at the limit of its capacities”, as recently admitted by President Sebastián Piñera; all this despite having vaccinated 7 million people, as reported by the Trans-Andean government.

In the midst of this “regrowth” – as Piñera described it -, the country has closed its borders and 238 of the 346 Chilean municipalities are in strict quarantine (without face-to-face lessons, bars and restaurants closed, as well as non-essential shops, social gatherings and prohibited events, curfew from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., etc.).

The main states of Brazil and Paraguay, to take just a few examples from South America – one of the regions where the second wave hits the hardest – are adopting similar measures against the global shortage of vaccines, on the one hand, and to avoid the collapse of man and health, on the other hand.

Ecuador, Venezuela and also Spain and Belgium, among many countries, are also with their hospitals and private clinics with little or no capacity to respond to the demands imposed by the pandemic, which it is made worse by the emergence and worldwide distribution of new, more contagious and potentially deadly variants of Covid-19.