QCOSTARICA – The latest report from the Research Unit of the Universidad Hispanoamericana School of Medicine reports that the contagion rate of covid-19 in Costa Rica “decreased moderately.”
According to the analysis, between Sunday, December 20 and Saturday, December 26, the contagion rate at the national level went from 173.2 infections per million inhabitants to 163.5 per million.
Limón and Puntarenas are the provinces with the highest infection rates, with 245.6 and 240.6 cases per million inhabitants, respectively. While the province with the lowest infection rate is Guanacaste with 129.5.
Meanwhile, the virus reproduction index or also called the R rate was 0.92 between December 20 and 26, which means a decrease of 0.02 compared to the week of December 12 to 19.
The R rate indicates how many people, on average, each carrier of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes covid-19, could infect.
If it is equal to 1, each person will infect, on average, another one, and this will keep the transmission constant. If it is at 2, on average each person will infect two more and the transmission speed will double.
Ideally, the R rate should be less than 1, which is a sign that the rate of new cases is decreasing. If the index is higher than 1, the evolution of the disease will have more speed.
With a rate of 1 the infection would remain constant.
This index does not have to do with the number of cases, but rather with the transmission speed or the speed with which the virus spreads.
According to the latest analysis from the Universidad Hispanoamericana, Cartago is the province with the highest R rate of 1.02, followed by Puntarenas with 0.98 and Limón with 0.95.
Despite the slight decrease in the rate of infections, experts in infectology, epidemiology and demography predict that the number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths from covid-19 will rebound in these first weeks of 2021, after the relaxation in the practice of basic measurements; among them, maintaining social bubbles, respecting physical distancing and using masks well.
