Portugal, struggling to prevent a coronavirus outbreak that has led to the highest mortality rate in Europe, has quickly filled the beds in intensive care units set up for Covid-19 patients and is being forced to remove critically ill patients from hospitals show.
Overwhelming hospitals, particularly in the capital of Lisbon, have asked patients to treat themselves at home, and some patients have been relocated to hospitals in regions with less severe outbreaks. The government has also asked other European countries for help.
Those who do show up at hospitals in Lisbon find a system on the edge, with numerous people standing outside waiting for treatment in ambulances.
“I really did not believe that this could ever happen in Portugal, and that patients would have to go from house to house to find a hospital that would be rescued,” said Tomás Lamas, a doctor in the two intensive care units. hospitals in Lisbon work. Hospitals are now forced to make life or death decisions about which patients to treat. “Three months ago, we had patients who were admitted to intensive care but who are not being considered now, basically because they have chronic illnesses or are old,” he said.
Portugal, a nation of about 10 million people on the Iberian Peninsula, is in the grip of its worst pandemic crisis. It recorded 12,757 coronavirus-related deaths, of which 5,576 in the last month alone.
Last year, during the first wave of infections, Portugal was one of Europe’s success stories after a strict lock was applied that kept the death toll low, especially compared to neighboring Spain.
But since Christmas, Portugal has seen an increase in cases and deaths. While new cases have apparently been reported in some regions this week, the outbreak is raging in Lisbon. “We are looking at a few weeks that will be difficult,” Portuguese Economy Minister Pedro Siza Vieira said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
Mr. Siza Vieira contracted the virus last month, and about a third of top government officials became ill themselves or had to isolate themselves after coming into contact with someone who tested positive.
Mr. Siza Vieira said that “many people” in Portugal saw family members during the Christmas holidays. Many, he added, traversed the country and ignored the rules prohibiting travel within the country. “The evidence of mobility in the country shows that people did not even respect the restrictions we had,” he said.
The Portuguese authorities also believe that the crisis was exacerbated by the rapid spread of the virus variant first discovered in Britain, which was probably brought to the country by Portuguese working in Britain and traveled back for Christmas, Mr. Siza Vieira said. “We have no evidence that the Brazilian variant is significantly active in Portugal, while we have evidence that the British variant explains more than half of the new cases, especially in the Lisbon area,” he said.
But British officials have expressed their own concern over the spread in Portugal of the variant first discovered in Brazil, which led Britain to announce travel restrictions on Portugal, which is popular with British tourists. The travel ban was part of a spate of border closures around the world as countries tried to curb the spread of new variants when they began mass vaccinations.
Isabel Vaz, who runs a network of 15 private hospitals, 11 clinics and one public hospital in Portugal, said Portugal should be commended for doubling the number of intensive care beds over the past year, as well as for the close coordination between the public and private healthcare systems to make full use of the available resources.
Mrs. Vaz added that in the run-up to Christmas, Portugal was caught up in a difficult balancing act because he both wanted to revive his economy and take full account of the risks of another spate of infections.
“As a country, I feel we do not understand the real enemy and the risks we faced during the winter,” she said. “But of course no country’s health care system is prepared for a tsunami like this.”
Whatever the cause of the infection in Portugal, new cases are only now beginning to slow down after a national exclusion was reintroduced in mid-January. Across the country, residents have to stay home and all non-essential stores are closed. Citizens also cannot travel outside the country unless it is for extraordinary reasons.
Portugal was initially one of the laggards in Europe in terms of vaccine distribution, and the rollout was also tainted by a number of scandals in the queue. But Mr. Siza Vieira maintains that the country is now on track to vaccinate about ten percent of the population by early March. He said 270,000 first doses of the vaccine and 70,000 second doses were administered as of Monday.
Within hospitals in Lisbon, staff are working around the clock to prepare for an expected increase in patients in need of emergency treatment. More wards are being converted into space for Covid-19 patients, but dr. Lamas said: “Adding beds is not the same as adding human resources, and we call on doctors and nurses from other specialties to help us, but who are not used to dealing with these types of patients.”
“It’s like starting from the ground up,” he continued, “because it’s a huge job to teach people how to use different equipment – and in a safe way.”
Portugal takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union in January, and the efforts appear to be pandemic.
Mr. Siza Vieiria said the group needed additional powers to deal with a pandemic, including ‘uniform criteria for opening or closing borders’.
“One of the lessons that this crisis is teaching us is that we really need a European Union that is empowered and has the resources to deal with this kind of threat that humanity faces and that can only be tackled on a continental level. be, “he said.
Some bloc countries offered assistance to Portugal over the weekend. German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said her country was getting ready to send army personnel and equipment, noting that all those deployed would be vaccinated. And Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria said on Twitter that his country will welcome patients transferred from Portugal without determining how many.
Ricardo Baptista Leite, an opposition lawmaker in Portugal, who is also a doctor and head of the public health department at the Catholic University of Portugal, said he was grateful for the support.
“We have now entered international aid to try to save as many lives as possible,” he said. “But the time will come to determine what went wrong.”