″Portugal reached the scenario better than the most traced last week″
Portugal reached 40,945 cases of covid-19 yesterday. The highest number since the beginning of the pandemic, but very close to the one recorded the previous week (39,570), precisely on Wednesday, January 5th.
As epidemiologist Carlos Antunes, a professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, who has been part of the disease evolution equipment since the beginning of the pandemic, explained to DN, the fact that the country reached this value, precisely on the same day of the previous week, “is the harbinger that we are reaching the peak of this epidemic wave”. And justifies cases: “Not to be the peak of having registered today (yesterday) a number of close to 50 thousand. We stayed at 40 thousand. Wednesday is a fundamental day in the monitoring of the disease, because it is the day on which we have registered all the cases accumulated in the previous days, namely on the weekend. If we still have a number of cases very close to the previous week, in terms of order of magnitude, it means that it is a harbinger that we are reaching the peak”.
The specialist details, so that it is better understood by the population, that “the easiest way to see if we are approaching the peak is by comparing the cases registered on a day with the same day of the week. is minimal, of 1375 cases of infection, and this difference should continue to decrease in the coming days of this wave”.
On the other hand, yesterday’s bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health (DGS) reported that one daily problem per 100,000 inhabitants had increased from 3204.4 at national level and from 3209.1 on the mainland to 3615.9 and 3615. .3 respectively. That is, for a value that has also never been recorded before, but not very different from other European countries, as it results from the impact of the new variant of SARS-CoV-2, Ómicron.
Carlos Antunes also explains that, although the value is high, it should not scare the population, because the normal “is a rate that can continue to rise until it reaches the peak, and this indicator always has a delay of seven days”. Therefore, “only after we reach the peak will it begin to decline”.
Regarding the transmissibility index, which continues to decrease, this is a good sign. Yesterday’s bulletin indicated that this value had increased from 1.24 to 1.23. “It is good that it continues to approach 1. When this trend continues, we say, in airplane language, that we are signaling to approach the runway to land. peak, which is good news.”
According to the professor at the Faculty of Sciences, the scenario reached by Portugal was the scenario most designed last week by the experts presented at the Infarmed meeting. “Right now, we can say that we’re analyzing better than the best course drawn last week.” Scenarios, if any, explain, which were probably drawn on the basis of assumptions that they are not verifying. For example, on the basis that R