São Paulo State 'Lockdown' Inevitable If Self
Projections made with a mathematical model developed at the Unicamp (State University of Campinas) show that Sao Paulo state will have to adopt a mandatory "lockdown," if the level of social isolation does not rise significantly in the coming weeks, starting this Tuesday (12). Between May 8 and 10, Sao Paulo state recorded, on average, 1,839 new daily cases of COVID-19, with 1,033 in the capital alone. The contagion rate (R0) is the number of people to whom an infected person transmits the virus. If this number, calculated from the 30 days before May 10, is applied to the end of June, then Sao Paulo state will have 53,500 new infections, with 20,800 daily cases in the city of Sao Paulo alone. During this period, the number of new cases will likely double every 11.5 days for the state and every 12.9 days for the capital in the coming weeks. The model analyzed the real data growth of coronavirus cases in the last month, which shows a contagion rate of 1.49 for the state and 1.44 for the city of Sao Paulo. That is, at the end of April, every 100 infected paulistas transmitted the new coronavirus to almost 150 people, on average (over a period of about 7.5 days after being infected, according to the model used).