Pharmacies and hospitals see rise in Covid-19 cases

Hospitals in São Paulo and pharmacies across Brazil have been recording an increase in Covid-19 cases in recent weeks, in a similar movement to that observed in clinics and laboratories.

According to the Municipal Health Department of São Paulo, the rate of positive diagnoses for the disease increased from 2.5% in the week of October 2 to 8 to 13.5% in the period between the 23rd and 29th.

When considering the moving average of positive cases in seven days, the city went from 142 in early October to 176 in the second week of the month. Subsequently, the average advanced to 309 and the last record is 505 cases.

This Friday (4), 27 patients were hospitalized in ICU beds (intensive care unit) in municipal hospitals, equivalent to 53% occupancy rate, and 55 were in ward beds, with 34% occupancy.

The private network has also observed an uptrend. In the São Camilo hospital network, for example, there were two patients hospitalized due to Covid-19 in the second week of October. On Thursday (3), it was 12.

In the network’s emergency rooms, care for patients with respiratory symptoms continues, with some fluctuations, at an average of 700 per day, and the institution says that it maintains the reinforcement of its teams to optimize triage flows, reduce waiting time and expand the capacity to attend to serious cases.

In pharmacies, positive tests for the disease returned to the double-digit level, according to Abrafarma (Brazilian Association of Pharmacy and Drugstore Networks), which brings together 26 networks responsible for about 45% of drug sales in the country.

Of the 14,970 tests carried out from October 17 to 23, 2,320 (15.5%) were positive. In the previous week, the rate was 9.36%.

Since the implementation of rapid testing in April 2020, Brazilian pharmacies have carried out 19.5 million tests. The positive results totaled 4,544,963 (23.29%).

The country has 34,887,505 infected with Sars-CoV-2 since the beginning of the pandemic. According to data provided by state health departments and compiled by the press consortium, 688,316 people died in the country from the disease.