Order presents seven recommendations for the country, including one on isolation

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The Order of Doctors (OM) defended this Wednesday that the new phase of the covid-19 pandemic requires “an agile adaptation” of norms and procedures and presents seven recommendations, including the reduction of isolation from 10 to seven days.

“The new pandemic phase in which Portugal finds itself, with the presence of a new variant and an exponential increase in the number of new infections, requiring an agile adaptation of the rules and procedures defined by the health authorities for better monitoring of covid patients, not covered and adhesion of the population to what is needed at any given time”, defends the OM in a statement.

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In this context, the chairman of the OM, Miguel Guimarães, and the coordinator of the Crisis Office for Covid-19, Filipe Froes, make seven recommendations, the first being the use of the Pandemic State Assessment Indicator (IAP), developed by OM and Instituto Superior Técnico, “to monitor the pandemic with coherence, understanding and involvement of the population”.

The “urgent immunization booster for the vulnerable” is another of the OM recommendations, stating that 15% of people aged 65 and over (about 2.3 million) are without vaccine booster – of which more than 230,000 are over 70 years old.

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“The reassessment of periods after isolation and leave due to illness or high-risk contact (for example, 7 days) with testing in order to ensure the safety of oneself and everyone, taking into account the presence of risk factors, vaccination status and the impact of absenteeism from work” is another of the measures consulted. Spain approved this Wednesday the reduction of isolation to seven days.

The Medical Association also recommends a “reassessment of the criteria and resources allocated to the follow-up of outpatients”, namely the allocation of general and family medicine physicians, which “compromises all other care activities to secondary disease”.

It also calls for the provision of “regular and transparent” data on inpatients and those who have died, namely age, comorbidities, vaccination status, “to support critical and urgent decisions”.

Change in the information system of the Directorate-General for Health, in order to follow the population’s need, namely with “a simple information page with the procedures to be adopted by infected citizens or with high-risk contacts”, and to strengthen the capacity of response, namely in the NHS24, in public health teams, in testing and vaccination centers, and activating the assistance response of the private and social sector, avoiding the aggravation of the impact of the pandemic on patients not covered, are other recommendations of the OM.

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Portugal has today registered a new maximum number of new daily infections since the beginning of the pandemic (26,867), according to the Directorate-General for Health. Since March 2020, 18,921 people have died in Portugal and 1,330,158 cases of infection have been recorded.