With the current pace of Omicron, Portugal can have 10 to 12 thousand infections per day between Christmas and New Year
In addition to changes in behavior, it may also affect the monitoring of the pandemic in the festive period ahead, given the increase in cases that are anticipated with a new variant, detection and screening may soon surpass the capacity set up in the country. Until now, Portugal had registered a slowdown without an increase in infections, but the first data for this week after a new acceleration. An analysis is made by Carlos Antunes, a researcher at the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon, that the increase in testing in recent weeks will have contributed to the slowdown, which suggested a peak in cases soon, but the 5800 new cases reported this Wednesday. The fair were already higher than expected, which may be linked to the fact that no last weekend has evidence that 9.5% of new cases in the country will be infections caused by Omicron, which is more transmissible.
Emphasizing that it is too early to be able to make projections with the methodology that has been used so far and which is based on the RT – the indicator that calculates people infects on average each infected, which the new variant seems to increase but the spread is not yet captured – Carlos Antunes explains that making an extrapolation from the evolution of the variant reported this week by INSA, between Christmas and the end of the year, 10 to 12 thousand new cases per day can be reached in the country – so far, the record of notifications in 24 hours was reached on Jan. 28, with more than 16,000 cases, but not all were diagnosed on the same day. “According to the INSA report on the genomic sequencing of the SARS-Cov-2 variants, the Omicron variant was already at a percentage in the sample of 9.5% as of 12. Taking the progression of that percentage as of yesterday’s date (which refers to the 5800 cases), this percentage will already be in the order of 13%. Which means that of the 5800 today, 800 will be from Omicron”, he explains. “Assuming a constant progression over the next two weeks, which corresponds to a doubling every four days, between Christmas and the end of the year, 10 to 12 thousand cases per day will be reached”, he continues, anticipating that the new variant represents then 80 % of cases in Portugal.
It is for this “unprecedented” rate of spread that authorities in the UK, the WHO and the European Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been warning countries, which yesterday recommended countries strong measures to reduce contacts as well as expand capacity to testing and screening and planning response in hospitals – even if a variant becomes more benign, if there is an increase in infections there is a risk that more cases will also arise requiring hospitalization.
In the field of testing and screening, however, there are limits, notes Carlos Antunes, who is part of the red lines team used by the DGS to monitor an epidemic. “To catch 12,000 cases a day and maintain positivity at 4%, while maintaining a high detection capacity, we had to be able to run 300,000 tests a day, which will be difficult. Furthermore, looking at the red lines, we already see that the percentage of contacts tracked is already below 70%, which is an indicator that there is a lack of capacity”, he says, explaining that in order to maintain universal tracking of contacts would be needed more than 2000 trackers when there are 600 and at most were 1400. “The reinforcement of trackers has always been delayed, we needed to double the tracking capacity already and increase the testing capacity on weekends and holidays”, it says. One of the recommendations left yesterday by ECDC is that greater control be made of Omicron cases, which can be signaled through the results of PCR tests (the methodology used by the INSA to estimate that Omicron represents 9.5% of diagnoses on Sunday. parents). Monitoring and tracking symptomatic cases is another proposal that has also been made by experts.