Third wave: City says the rate of infections began to fall

The Government of the City of Buenos Aires said on Tuesday that the rate of coronavirus infections began to fall and predicted a shorter wave than the previous ones.” The rate of contagiousness is beginning to be reduced, to go down,” said the mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, at a press conference. In addition, he highlighted a slight decrease in the R (reproduction of the contagion), which, he said, went from 1.3 to 1.25.He said, not obsattentive, that cases continue to rise, but pointed out that the increase is not reflected in the occupation of intensive care units. “Today the cases continue to grow: we are at 12,300 cases of Covid, which is a very high number. However, this is not reflected in a serious increase in intensive care beds, which are at a low level,” he said. In turn, Health Minister Fernán Quirós said he expects this third wave “to be less durable” than the previous ones. “The international experience is that the Omicron wave, since it rises so fast, is usually shorter in duration. We expect it to be a less lasting wave than the first, which was very long, and especially the second, which was not so long,” he said. His words agree with what was stated by his counterpart from the Nation, Carla Vizzotti, who said that the Ómicron variant is different from the previous ones because it has “a shorter incubation period” and that it is expected “that infections begin to fall faster”. As a sample of how the pandemic may evolve in the coming weeks, the head of the health portfolio cited the case of Córdoba, the first province in the country where the variant first identified in South Africa exploded. There, he said, cases “stopped increasing exponentially” after about seven days of restrictions.

Original source in Spanish