Lisbon. Health asks for support to military personnel for screening
By Felícia Cabrita and Marta F. Reis
The Regional Health Administration of Lisbon and Tagus Valley asked for help from the Army to strengthen the tracing of contacts and epidemiological inquiries in the Lisbon region, already at the limit of capacity. Yesterday, positive cases from the beginning of the week, still to be contacted, after the diagnoses had doubled in the region in a few days, a trend towards an abrupt rise in infections that is expected throughout the country. According to what Nascer do SOL found, the reinforcement may however prove difficult, as there are not enough teams formed for the number of daily infections that are anticipated in the short term. 91 military personnel are already cooperating with health teams in Lisbon. There was already a partnership agreement with the ARS to advance the reinforcement of the teams, but some contracts for military personnel in this work were not renewed due to lack of authorization and appropriateness.
In the news published globally, the IHME points out that there are other aspects that can make them problematic. “Many of the policies around testing in schools and workplaces that have evolved into earlier variants, with very high infection-hospitalization rates and infection mortality rates, and the necessary period of isolation after a positive test, will be very problematic during the peak of Omicron », named Christopher Murray on the IHME website, considering that it should be evaluated whether the testing of asymptomatics and the reduction of isolation periods should be maintained:« If the main ones followed the same addresses, some employers and lack of labor available work ».
For now, with Christmas at greater risk of infection than a year ago, one of the warnings in recent days was for tests to be carried out as soon as possible – for example, before Christmas Eve and before lunch in the morning. Miguel Guimarães, President of the Doctors, criticized yesterday the slowing down of the increase in vaccination, which will have a five-day Christmas break. “Note that the self-tests … reliability is very low,” he stressed. “Rapid antigen tests, yes, but made by someone who knows how to do it, which is for them to be, in fact, reliable, because otherwise we are pretending that we are doing testicles and wasting money uselessly”, he told Lusa. Crowded bookings are a practical problem these days. One of the measures being studied yesterday by the DGS was to shorten the validity of rapid tests for the effects of compliance from 48 to 24 hours and PCR from 72 to 48, which will imply more tests.