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The doctor António Pais Lacerda, director of the Internal Medicine II service of the Santa Maria Hospital, in Lisbon, warns that the fear of losing their salary or job leads people infected by the new coronavirus to hide their situation.
“There are parents who are infected at home and take their children to school and do not say anything to anyone” and “people who continue to go to work with someone who is sick at home and do not say it because they are afraid of being on less pay or less ability to take bread home “, which turns out to be” a very serious social situation, “reports the director of the service where patients with covid-19 and those suspected of having contracted the infection are in the infirmary.
António Pais Lacerda warns that people have to “take the appropriate precautions” and if they know that they have been around someone infected, they should be careful to say that they will be quarantined at home.
“It is not that I am with that person who was infected, but I am not going to do anything because I feel good. That is silly, because it is what maintains the contamination of others,” the internist said in statements to Lusa in the service who is driving.
As it is not yet known when there will be a vaccine, “the responsibility belongs to everyone, but it belongs to everyone in the sense that no one is to blame, but everyone has to stop this, because if not, in a short time, too many will enter”. patients in hospitals “.
“If we have 200 or 300 cases in a day, maybe one or two will enter the hospital. If we have 2000, perhaps more will enter the hospitals and if we have 5,000 there will be many more and suddenly there will be no number of beds” for patients . covid-19, or for other patients.
At some point, you will eventually have to think about whether you need to use private hospital beds, for example to help non-covid-19 patients or eventually make “special tents to increase the number of beds even outside of normal hospital locations.”
“All this has already been done and is being done abroad” and “it must be avoided and that is in the washed hands of each one and in the mask of each one”, he emphasizes.
In his opinion, it is necessary to elucidate the population with real cases and show that it is not a disease that affects only the elderly.
“Our highest number of hospitalizations is after 70 years, but we have had hospitalizations of people around 30, 50 and in recent times more,” he emphasizes.
The expert believes that the media talk a lot about this aspect, but they talk more with numbers, and that does not reach the people.
“People are tired of seeing numbers: there are 200 more, more than 2,500 and 3,000 more, the barrier has passed. At some point people no longer know what that means and stop thinking about it, ”he observes.
For the doctor, a large part of the population has already “stopped calling”, exemplifying with young people, who think that the disease hardly affects them.
Regardless of not having symptoms or having mild symptoms, young people must think that they can transmit the disease “to others, who are parents, grandparents, etc.”, says António Pais Lacerda, leaving his testimony: “That is what we see here “.
The covid-19 pandemic has already claimed more than 1.1 million deaths and more than 44.5 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report by the French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 2,428 people died from 132,616 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate General of Health.
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