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The two rooms of the Army’s Geospatial Information Center, where 15 soldiers track the contacts of those infected with covid-19 in collaboration with the group of health centers in Cascais, resemble school classes in everything. Trackers are seated at the recommended social distance at small tables and have a computer in front. The coordinator stands before them, as if he were a teacher. How to assemble the platform trail covid, popularized in the press conferences of the General Directorate of Health, which seeks the clue of the virus in the community. It is a remote job, with pitfalls and surprises for this military team.
“I will contact my attorney.” It was Tuesday morning that a user contacted by cable deputy Cabral ended two conversations spaced 15 minutes apart. “The lady had been without a mask in a car with a positive case,” explains the soldier to the PUBLIC. “I called this morning [terça-feira] After nine, he asked me to call him a little later. So I did it. He was indisposed, suspected, doubted, said he was going to contact the lawyer and hung up. The case was referred to the health center ”, he reports.
Obviously, each call involves the presentation of the tracker. He gives the job and says he’s from the Army, explains what he’s coming for, following the parameters defined for a risk contact. Namely: someone who lived without a mask, less than two meters and for more than 15 minutes with a case that tested positive for covid-19.
In this case, Sherlock Holmes’s work, to reconstruct the contacts of an infected person and thus break the chain of transmission, was delayed. The epidemiological survey was left unaddressed and passed under the jurisdiction of the Cascais health center. It was the most recent and unusual refusal the military received. Gladly cable deputy Cabral says he will never forget this episode. The second negative that has already lived, but the first with the invocation of the recourse to a cause.
“It takes a lot of human touch. We try to understand who is on the other side, the situation is not easy ”, acknowledges Captain Pires, coordinator of this group. “They receive us in the most varied ways, there are those who want help, others have difficulty giving the personal information we ask for and there are those who refuse to provide the names of the contacts,” he summarizes.
“Through the discourse that we maintain, we anticipate social differences, but in all strata there are those who want to collaborate or not, which is often related to working conditions,” he says. “When people are in prophylactic isolation, they suspend their work, they are not entitled to other benefits, and they do not pretend to be isolated so as not to lose income,” says Captain Rebelo, of the Army General Staff. After all, if the virus can reach anyone, its incidence is different from case to case. It has the revealing power of the social reality of a powerful magnifying glass.
“There are funny situations,” reflects Captain Pires. “Those who did compulsory military service have a certain empathy for us,” he reveals: “Others, who have been locked up at home for a long time or who are alone, feel the need to talk, in some situations we are a kind of psychiatrist.”
Decisive is, therefore, the first contact. “The focus is on training. It is a very sensitive issue. We present ourselves with the position on behalf of the Portuguese Army in support of the National Health Service ”, he insists. In the case of this group that works with groups of health centers in Cascais, this theoretical training was carried out, in three or four days, in Amadora and the practice already in Cascais, municipalities of the Regional Health Administration (ARS) from Lisbon and Vale. do Tejo, where four teams operate, according to the November Council of Ministers resolution that assigned these functions to the Armed Forces. In addition to the others that they already carry out, such as awareness campaigns for hygiene in homes. Or the establishment, in the Belém Military Hospital, of the Covid-19 Military Support Center, in conjunction with the Regional Health Administration and the Vale do Tejo, currently with 60 beds, but with capacity for another 30 on a third floor .
The operation of the followers began on November 19 and, until December 20 [passado domingo], the teams had carried out 22,331 consultations involving more than 43,336 contacts. The schedule, from Monday to Monday, begins in the morning and runs until 8 p.m., in a lamination of team members.
Trackers missing
The Army has the capacity to constitute 35 of these teams and, currently, in addition to the four that operate in the Lisbon and Vale do Tejo area, there are another eight that work in the Northern Regional Administration, involving 120 soldiers in these two areas. This commitment, according to a communication from the General Staff of the Armed Forces at the beginning of the second week of December, in addition to the Army, with a greater presence on the ground, also includes the other branches, the Navy and the Air Force, involving up to 356 soldiers. . divided by 19 teams.
The need for more trackers was underlined by public health services in the first wave of the pandemic, because it diverted clinical teams to a necessary and laborious administrative profile role. However, the immediate future will not do without this need. This Friday, December 26, according to the Portuguese Association of Hospital Administrators and the National Association of Public Health Physicians, Portugal will need between 5,173 and 6,441 trackers. Christmas and the New Year raise concerns and advise timely preparation.
The average time to carry out an epidemiological survey is 45 minutes and, on average, each positive case generates another seven. At the Army Geospatial Information Center, the monitoring team conducts 24 epidemiological surveys per day, from three to four per operator. – and 50 contacts.
