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The list of 14-day incidence rates of new cases per one hundred thousand inhabitants of the municipalities, disclosed this Monday by the General Health Directorate (DGS), is led by Paços de Ferreira, Lousada, Vizela, Manteigas, Paredes and Peñafiel . . Of these six municipalities, five are among the 13 with the lowest number of elderly people for every 100 young people, according to 2019 data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
The exception to the rule is the municipality of Beira de Manteigas, the fourth with the highest incidence rate: it is the 285th municipality in mainland Portugal with the lowest rate of aging, or, if we want, the 24th oldest per 100 young people. (399.6).
Paços de Ferreira and Lousada are the only two municipalities in the country with more than three thousand new cases per 100 thousand inhabitants (3,698 and 3,362, respectively) and they are also the youngest of those listed in the previous paragraph: Lousada is just behind Mafra in the aging rate table, with 98.1 elderly for every 100 young people. This INE indicator considers people older than 65 and over and young people from 0 to 14 years old.
The second wave of the pandemic has predominantly reached the younger age groups, in which more cases have been identified, but with lower rates of hospitalization and fatality. DGS data indicate that around 45% of the cases identified in Portugal since the start of the pandemic were people under 40 years of age, almost 107 thousand cases, but only ten of the deaths occurred in this age group. And, according to the Minister of Health, Marta Temido, only 4% of those hospitalized at this time are people under 40 years of age.
The young population is one of the many factors
The fact that there is a younger population does not in itself justify an increase in cases in these municipalities in the Tâmega and Vale do Sousa region (and surroundings, in the case of Paredes, which belongs to the Porto Metropolitan Area, and Vizela , in the Vale do Ave region). The differences in the epidemiological situations that exist between various regions of the country have to be analyzed based on the characteristics of the respective population tissues, as explained by Teresa Sá Marques, geographer at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto (FLUP).
The researcher explains that youth is “a factor of a series of factors” that justify the high transmission in these municipalities.
“I know [as pessoas] They predominantly develop tertiary activities, they can be more confined, ”he recalls, given the example of Albufeira, one of the municipalities with the lowest aging rate, but with a lower incidence compared to Paços de Ferreira or Lousada.
“They may have the same demographic characteristics, but it will always depend on others. And also of the collective conscience, of course ”, he justifies by phone with the PUBLIC.
In the case of the most affected municipalities, this combination of characteristics begins with the youth fabric that lives there.
“Youth, by nature, is an age group to which there is great interaction, and the fact that we have opened schools motivates that contact”, recognizes Teresa Sá Marques. But the influence of age is not limited to those who are still in school: in these municipalities there is a “very strong” population in sectors that cannot switch to teleworking.
“The sectors that dominate these territories are mainly industrial in nature that have always been operating,” says the geographer. Furthermore, it is an economic fabric “dominated by small companies”, often family businesses, in which workers do not always respect the norms of prevention of transmission.
“We know, in general, not only in this region, that in smaller companies there is a constant practice of wearing masks. The relationship between the people of the company is very close, some are relatives, neighbors, which makes people less strict in these behaviors ”.
Teresa Sá Marques stresses that this is a labor market with “a young active population associated with not very high levels of education”, which can sometimes lead to measures “not always being taken seriously” and taking longer time to be fulfilled. They are sectors of work -such as industry or construction- in which people “expose themselves more” because they cannot be locked up, because “they need a salary to live and survive”.
The teacher also adds that this young active population, “beyond school”, works in a “highly mobile” environment, with frequent trips to Porto, for example, and with a lot of interaction with neighboring regions such as Vale do Ave.
Proximity relationships are not limited to work and re-enter the equation of high contagion through family relationships, which Teresa Sá Marques describes as a factor in everything “positive, but negative in the case of covid-19”.
“We have a context of extended families. The family is a very important space in the quality of life of these populations, and they have the habit of meeting on weekends, eating together ”, explains the geographer.
“They are very cohesive communities, both at the family and local level. And that is good, I hope we have this solidarity in all territorial contexts. The problem is that everything that is proximity is bad in this pandemic ”, he laments.
The first wave should have been a lesson
Population with a large number of active young people, professional occupations that find it difficult to lock themselves in, an economic fabric dominated by small companies and in areas where there is great cohesion, both professionally and personally, with the family and the neighborhood. This set of indicated characteristics makes this territory, says Teresa Sá Marques, “a risk zone”, which should have been addressed before the second wave.
“Before the summer it must have been attack policies that made the pandemic to search the territories according to their characteristics. We did not do that ”, says the expert, recalling that one of the first outbreaks also occurred near the region now affected (the outbreak in a shoe factory in Felgueiras, in March, gave rise to 33 cases of covid-19 and forced 700 more people. be isolated).
The geographer believes that there should be “more information” available about what is happening in each territory.
“We must learn that until we have efficient, rigorous and information-based territorial monitoring systems, we will not be able to make good decisions, because we do not have enough information.”
The best possible management of a pandemic must always have “a large participation of local structures,” he considers, in order to accurately detail the risks associated with each municipality.
“We should have started this earlier, with mayors, inter-municipal communities. (…) You had to think about it beforehand. Now, with community contagion, it is very difficult to control ”.
