Unos 21,323 new weekly cases of the Covid-19 virus would be registered in the country during the week of October 18 to 24 of this year, equivalent to 3,057 per day, according to the projections made in this regard by the Johns Hopkins coronavirus case tracker and Global Public Health expert, Denise Gómez.

The Dominican specialist assures that with these projections, she is conservative, using as a reference a transmissibility rate of 1.66, but that it could be higher due to the circulation of different variants and because she is convinced that the Delta is present in the country. However, officially it has not been detected.

In addition to the number of circulating variants and their virulence, the expert bases her projections, based on the current behavior of the epidemic, civil disobedience to protection measures, superspreading events that the population carries out every weekend throughout the country, on weakness in contact tracing and active case search.

In a visit to Listín Diario, the specialist said that the increase in cases is already beginning to be visualized with the systematic increase in the percentage of positivity of the samples that the country has been reporting for several days.

Every week
Gómez reported that weekly she has been making projections of the virus’s behavior in the country that have been fulfilled. The most significant increase in cases, breaking the barrier of a thousand daily, is expected to begin to be registered from the week of September 20 to 26.

She recalled that the transmissibility rate of the Delta variant is from 6 to 8; that is, each infected person can infect that number and considered it a weakness that the country is sequencing with very few samples.

Vaccinate undocumented people
Gómez understands that the country should be doing massive tests for the virus, with four times the number that is currently done, and especially contact tracing and not leave the diagnosis, as is presently the case, at the discretion of the patient, because the price that will be paid could be very high.

Regarding vaccination, she said that the country must include the undocumented, whose population could be around one or two million people, which joins a large part of the Dominican population that has not yet been vaccinated.

She said it increases the number of people circulating in the country without being vaccinated against the virus and, therefore, the risk of contagion and transmission.

Gómez notes that health care workers, those in the hotel area, and high-risk people should be followed up every one to two months.

The health expert suggests bolstering education, continuing to vaccinate, and incorporating close contact tracing to cut the line of transmission of the virus.