This figure coincides with the reopening of businesses in Santiago, the country’s capital, which is home to 8 million people, or about 40% of Chile’s population, and is chile’s hardest-hit town since the virus arrived in March.
Ricardo Baeza-Yates, professor and director of knowledge science at the northeast campus of Silicon Valley, suggests that official figures detreating the true scale of the epidemic in his home country.The fault is the strategy used through the country’s Ministry of Fitness, he says.bad,” he says.
Baeza-Yates is part of a small organization of Chilean scientists who analyzed coVID-19’s knowledge to perceive the true extent of the epidemic in Latin America’s fifth most affected country after Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Colombia.learned how complicated it is to generate accurate knowledge because of the nature of the pandemic.It is also one of 40 studies advising the government on how to implement its fitness strategy, highlighting the importance of tactile studies to curb the spread of the disease.
“Even though we have vague data, we want quality data,” he says.”And if we have to make comparisons, we have to be very careful with the measures we use to compare.”
Today, as the country relaxes its mitigation measures to revive the economy, Baeza-Yates fears that there will soon be a resurgence on the horizon.
“My projection, unfortunately, is that we’ll have a momentary wave,” he says.”In a sense, we are following America, precisely the same pattern.Chile has halved, but in the north of the country it is still very strong.”
It portrays a country that, until recently, and with the exception of the southern region, was totally or partially blocked.At the height of the pandemic in June, the tests cannot be widely performed and there is not enough evidence for the number of infections in the country.The response time for viral diagnostic tests went from a few days to more than a week and, in some cases, two months, as labs across the country were overloaded, Baeza-Yates said.
“The main effect of this is that not enough tests are done, the infection grows rapidly,” he says.Recently, he said, the government increased its testing capacity by 30 percent, which was needed in May.
Baeza-Yates says one of the most demanding situations he and his colleagues face is not having full knowledge of the Department of Health, which makes it difficult to investigate.
“There are ambiguous criteria,” he says. If they say that the number of instances is minimized through a safe percentage to open a region, they do not say how many days will be achieved.”
He warned that the official number of cases reported through the government is well below actual infection rates, as the government only considers positive evidence and not the overall rate of infections.At first, the actual figure is 3 times the estimate, he said.
“Basically, there were three times as many people as the government reported,” Baeza-Yates said.”Once the pandemic increases, this number worsens because it is even more complicated to insinuate everyone who has become inflamed.”.”
Baeza-Yates says the actual number of infections in Chile is five times higher than the estimate, compared to 4 times more in the United States.
Worse, he says that the Chilean government has not been absolutely transparent that the figures were not representative of the actual number of cases, in addition, the country has the rate of jurisprudence, which is the number of other people with COVID-19 who have died.as a result of the disease, the mortality rate, which is how often other people in the country have died from COVID-19.: the metric used in the United States
“The government has the jurisprudence index to say it’s doing very well because it’s less than the top of countries,” says Baeza-Yates.
But this figure hides the scale of the epidemic in Chile.Part of his paintings in Chile includes selling transparency of knowledge.Especially now, he says, open knowledge can save lives and repair the confidence of the Chilean public in their leadership.