For researchers, the state of Ceará should become the new epicenter. Projections indicate that in early April the record should be 3 thousand cases.
In projections made by researchers from Rede CoVida, an initiative by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), everything indicates that Ceará could become the first Brazilian state to reach the peak of infections due to the new coronavirus. The forecast is for April 25th.
Added to this, the research report estimates that the mark of 3,000 patients infected with the virus should be surpassed in the state this week. And it will therefore be in second place among the most affected in the country.
number of cases
According to data from the Secretary of Health of Ceará (Sesa), released this Sunday (5), in Ceará there are already 976 infected people. And there have been 26 deaths recorded from the disease. The results are from one month after the first confirmation of infection in the state.
In the bulletin of Rede CoVida shows that Ceará should reach this Wednesday (8), the number of 3,053 people infected by the new coronavirus. With these numbers, it surpasses Rio de Janeiro, which so far has 2,887 infections. And it will be behind only São Paulo, which has 11,684 cases.
The calculation also points out that Brazil should have about 21 thousand cases of infected patients and more than 500 deaths from the disease on that same day.
Researches
The group made up of statisticians, epidemiologists, physicists, computer scientists, economists and communicators, among others, calculated the potential for reproduction of the infection to find out how quickly the virus spreads in Brazilian states. In this way, the researchers considered how a person with covid-19 can spread the disease in the regions that were analyzed. Thus, they identified the reproduction factor, R0, of 2.56, in Ceará.
Values from R0 to 1 classify the location as an “expanding epidemic”. With an index similar to that of Ceará, with an R0 greater than 2, are states such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Federal District, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. In Italy, a country where the spread of the virus has occurred at an accelerated rate, the R0 rate is 3.
The researchers also evaluate, in addition to the transmission rate, the number of people cured and the number of deaths due to Covid-19. For this, they use a model called SIR (Susceptible, Infected and Recovered). The study takes into account that patients discharged after Covid-19 cannot be infected again, but considers that other research has pointed to the possibility of falling ill with the virus a second time.
