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Portugal could reach December with almost 20 thousand daily cases of covid-19 and the epidemic could cause around 8 thousand deaths by the end of the year. The projections are from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of the University of Washington, which in recent days has released a set of projections and different scenarios for what has been considered a second wave of the pandemic. Researchers prepare projections for all countries, assuming three scenarios. The “current projection”, which predicts that Portugal will arrive at the beginning of 2021 with 8,113 deaths attributable to covid-19, is based on the assumption that the population continues to wear masks in public as they have been until now, that the relief of restrictive measures remains but that the strictest confinement measures be reintroduced for six weeks when 8 deaths per million inhabitants are reached, including the closure of schools and non-essential services. In the analysis of the University of Washington, if this does not happen, Portugal may reach the level of 80 thousand daily cases of covid-19 by the end of the year. In the scenario of reintroduction of measures, which would occur at the beginning of December – they estimate that on December 3 80 deaths a day will be reached – infections would begin to decrease from the level of 20 thousand cases a day. A third, more favorable scenario assumes that the use of masks increases to 95% of the population in the space of seven days and that containment measures are reintroduced later if the level of eight deaths per million inhabitants is exceeded. In this scenario, projections point to a more gradual increase in cases, with a peak of 17,000 daily infections at the end of December and 4015 deaths at the end of the year, with the reactivation of confinement measures at the end of December.
The projections suggest that at the peak of the epidemic in December, in the central scenario, 1,754 intensive care beds for patients with covid-19 and 1600 ventilators could be needed, needs that put the installed capacity line in the country in this moment. The maximum number of beds needed for patients with covid-19 in the central scenario of the evolution of the pandemic would be 4,262 beds, within the installed capacity.
This Monday the national situation will be presented at the meeting between experts and politicians, scheduled for the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto. The so-called Infarmed meeting, which later changes address, will now be broadcast online. The meeting begins at 3:00 p.m. and the program includes presentations on the epidemiological situation, the case-control study (in which one of the objectives was to understand the effect of public transport), the StayAway Covid app and a future vaccine. A second part will be dedicated to covid-19 in children and the challenge of going back to school. According to the latest analysis by the Ricardo Jorge Institute, the epidemic is growing. In the last week of August, the RT stood at 1.14. This Sunday, 315 new cases of covid-19 were registered.
The analysis from the University of Washington is already sounding the alarms. During the weekend, Social Democratic Representative Ricardo Baptista Leite considered the projections very worrying, an additional element for the anticipation of the coming months. Globally, the IHME predicts that the covid-19 epidemic could cause a total of 2.8 million deaths by the end of the year, estimating that the universal use of masks would reduce the impact by 30%, to two million deaths. .
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