Low pandemic of critical level for alarm situation in Portugal — DNOTICIAS.PT
Portugal lowered the level to the alarm situation without evaluation by the Instituto Superior Técnico and the Ordem dos Médicos, which means a critical indicator of the pressure on health services.
According to the latest data from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), the indicator that assesses the risk of the pandemic for health services is now at 7.59, already below the threshold of the alert level set at 80 points.
“The forecast is from today a very big pandemic to the imminent in the coming days”, said one of those responsible for the elaboration and daily update of this indicator of the date of the next day.
The epidemiological situation is “very favorable and the paradigm has changed”, said the IST professor, for whom “now the measures no longer limit the growth and decrease of cases”, since the number of infections will decrease across the country. have reached “saturation” — people who have already been infected or who are vaccinated against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
This indicator is based on five parameters – new cases, deaths, internal rates in wards and intensive care, illness (Rt) and is composed of a determination of infections – which corresponds to a scale that has as criteria the 80 points of the alert level and the 100 points from the critical level.
When this assessment exceeds 100 points, the “National Health Service has to allocate more patients who do not have covid-19 to the background. There are many treatments that are beginning to be postponed”, explained Henrique Oliveira.
As of 21 January, the assessment indicator of the two institutions reached a value above 10 points (critical level), having reached a maximum of 105.8 in this pandemic wave on 24 January.
Since, the value of the indicator has been decreasing, reflecting the reduction in the number of cases, then the probability and the transmissibility index (Rt) of the coronavirus, now reaching 79.59.
In the recent wave, Portugal exceeded the critical level for the second time in this assessment since the beginning of the pandemic, with the first occurring between the end of October 2020 and February 2021, when the greatest pressure on health services was recorded. .
In this one, the number of patients admitted to Portuguese hospitals reached a maximum of 6,869 – with all hospitalizations being motivated by other pathologies, despite the existence of SARS-CoV-2 infection – with more than 900 people in intensive care units. , with more than 300 deaths recorded in two days (January 28 and 31), numbers much higher than the current ones.
The indicator continues to have the activity of the pandemic based on the incidence and the disease (Rt), but also the severity of the disease, determined in terms of lethality and intensive care interns.
This assessment method was publicly presented on July 14, 2021 by the Instituto Superior Técnico and Ordem dos Médicos, which proposed it to the competent authorities as a matrix for the risk analysis of the pandemic.
At the time, the Ministry of Health guaranteed that the standards contained in this indicator were already considered in decisions about the pandemic.
Covid-19 has caused at least 5.78 million deaths worldwide since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the latest report by the Agence France-Presse.
In Portugal, since March 2020, 20,492 people have died and 3,069,128 cases of infection have been recorded, according to the latest update from the Directorate-General for Health.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
The Ómicron variant that spreads and suffers from the world quickly, became since the first time, in November, South Africa.