“A pandemic is like an oil tanker: it keeps moving forward long after you hit the brakes,” analyzes political commentator Nicholas Kristof, in an article published in The New York Times. And slowing down the evolution of the disease is one of the goals of the quarantines adopted by countries. Thus, even though the disease spreads, the health system is able to cope and prevent many deaths. Some Asian countries like South Korea and Singapore have become a reference in the control of covid-19 due to measures taken early in the pandemic. China, after 2 months of quarantine, managed to control the progress of the disease. However, a new threat appears: the second wave of contamination.
New cases have been detected even in nations that have managed to control community transmission. These are people who arrived from other countries bringing the covid-19. This has caused new infections in places said to be exemplary, such as Singapore and South Korea. And the measures taken during the first wave may dictate the direction of how the future will be. “The time is not to discuss whether a second wave will come because that is right. The question is how it will come. Most likely, the coronavirus will cause waves in the next two years. The question will be our ability to test as many people as possible, to know how many are infected, to isolate the cases ”, explains Domingos Alves, from the University of São Paulo, in an interview with O Globo. He is part of the team of universities behind the Covid-19 Brazil project, which makes assertive projections of the disease’s progress – in one of them, for example, the group believes that there are more than 6 times the number of official cases. According to David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine, the ideal model for treating a pandemic would be to identify those infected, test them and isolate them, as well as their relatives. However, with the current community transmission scenario, this is no longer possible. “The current roadblocks offer the opportunity to buy time to accelerate a comprehensive testing regime,” says Wells, an expert on how the impacts of climate change affect human life.
The control of covid-19 brings a series of challenges: the development in record time of a vaccine (something that can take more than 1 year), a 100% effective treatment against the virus, the economic impact caused by this and by future quarantines , among others. Another worrying factor is that the lethality rate has increased. In Germany and South Korea, it has long been at 0.5%, making it an enviable brand for the rest of the world. Currently, however, it is at 1% in these countries, showing that the new coronavirus still has a lot to surprise in the coming months. It is worth remembering that the end of the quarantine can take to the streets millions of people who are not yet immune against the disease. Thus, even when it flattens, the infection curve can grow again if the virus is still circulating in community transmission. For Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the number of deaths and new cases in the United States is expected to start falling in June. However, even at this time, 95% of Americans will still be vulnerable to covid-19 – a relaxation of the quarantine could generate a new wave of contagions.
