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Fernán Quirós, Health Minister of the City of Buenos Aires. | Joaquin Temes
This year there has been more testing than last. What are the most important data to bear in mind – the number of daily cases of contagion, the people in intensive care or the deaths?
All three are important. There are three main epidemiological links, all highly interlinked.
The first is the number of people infected, which is related to the PCR diagnosis, in turn depending on much testing and who is really ill. The City of Buenos Aires has done a lot of work in seroprevalence which has shown that for every positive PCR there are 2.5 people so that we can take that as the ratio for calculating the daily number of the truly ill. It’s a pretty tight ratio even at international level.
The city of Serrana in Brazil is a living experiment.
The picturesque place, surrounded by sugarcane fields, is nestled in the southeast of one of the countries hit hardest by COVID-19. By the end of March, daily deaths in Brazil surged to 3,000 on average a day, a high in a pandemic that has claimed more than 405,000 lives there the second worst death toll of any country in the world behind only the United States. And as vaccines slowly trickle into the country, only about 15 percent of the population has gotten at least one shot.
Except in Serrana. There, nearly all the adults have gotten their shots. What happens next in this city could provide a glimpse of what the future of the pandemic could be not only in Brazil but across the globe as vaccinations pick up.
China Mandates Vaccination of All Military Personnel Despite Numerous Reports of Vaccine Related Deaths and Low Vaccine Efficacy
Despite numerous reports of deaths caused by Chinese vaccines in Hong Kong and the mainland, Chinese authorities have ordered all members of the military to be vaccinated.
The death of a Chinese soldier who received China’s Sinovac vaccine, and other vaccine related death cases, are hotly discussed on Chinese social media.
On April 15, a Weibo user in Shenzhen, using the handle “Wild Foothill Flowers,” said her brother, a soldier, died after receiving the Sinovac vaccine.
“My brother was a 28-year-old soldier with no medical history. The troop arranged for everyone to receive the Sinovac inactivated vaccine produced in Beijing. The first dose was given on Jan. 11. The second dose was given on Feb. 8, at Shenzhen Binhe Avenue Women’s and Children’s Social Health Center.”