Portugal has dropped from a critical level to an alarm situation in the pandemic assessment indicator of the Instituto Superior Técnico and the Ordem dos Médicos, which means a relief from 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 79.59, already below the threshold of the alert level set at 80 points.
«The forecast is for this indicator to decline very sharply in the coming days», mathematician Henrique Oliveira, one of those responsible for the preparation and daily update of this indicator of the Covid-19 pandemic, told Lusa yesterday.
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 composed of five parameters - new cases, deaths, hospitalized in wards and intensive care, transmissibility index (Rt) and incidence of infections - which make up a scale that has as thresholds the 80 points of the alert level and the 100 points. of the critical level.
When this assessment exceeds 100 points, the “National Health Service has to allocate more resources and begins to have to move patients who do not have Covid-19 to the background. There are many treatments that are starting to be postponed», explained Henrique Oliveira.
As of January 21, the pandemic assessment indicator of the two institutions reached a value above 100 points (critical level), having reached a maximum of 105.8 in this pandemic wave on the 24th.
Since then, the value of the indicator has been decreasing, reflecting the reduction in the number of cases, the incidence 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 registered. .
At this time, the number of patients admitted to Portuguese hospitals reached a maximum of 6.869 – not all hospitalizations are due to Covid-19, and may be motivated by other pathologies despite the existence of infection with SARS-CoV-2 – with more than 900 people in intensive care units, with more than 300 deaths recorded in two days (28 and 31 January), numbers much higher than the current ones.
The indicator continues to take into account the activity of the pandemic from the incidence and transmissibility (Rt), but also encompasses the severity of the disease, determined according to lethality and admissions to wards and intensive care.
This assessment method was publicly presented on 14 July by the Instituto Superior Técnico and the 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 ensured that the parameters included in this indicator were already considered in decisions on the pandemic.
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