“We are in this situation because we were from the last countries to confine”

OR The pulmonologist Filipe Froes defended, this Monday, that Portugal should enter the confinement earlier, along with other European countries. “We are in this situation because we were from the last countries to confine,” he considered, in an interview with Miguel Sousa Tavares, on TVI.

According to the coordinator of the Ordem dos Medicos Crisis Office, compared to the first wave, Portugal went from “the best student in Europe to the worst”.

Furthermore, for Filipe Froes, the first wave “went so well” that the country did not realize the “fragility of the National Health Service” (SNS) and, for example, the problem posed by asymptomatic people. “We devalue the pandemic, we turn the abnormal into normal,” he said.

Regarding the current state of the SNS, Filipe Froes recalled that, in theory, the entire public health network in the country has a total of 21 thousand beds and, therefore, its capacity has up to that limit of places.

However, the expert stressed, “we have to make the correct diagnosis, we are in a catastrophe” because the more “we requalify for Covid, the less we are doing for non-Covid patients and, considering that” there are no personnel to maintain the ratio “, the” The consequence is that we are endangering the entire health of our country. “

Asked by Miguel Sousa Tavares about whether he believes that the Government has been pursuing the damage since the summer, the consultant for the General Health Directorate (DGS) agreed, stating that there has been “a more reactive than proactive attitude” and that various measures, including the confinement, they arrived late. “In a pandemic, a week is huge,” he recalled.

As for the future, the pulmonologist stressed that the impact of the new coronavirus in the coming years is not yet known and considered that it may become exclusively seasonal, like the flu. “You can stay here forever. What usually happens is that the virus tends to lose skills over time and begins to live in a better balance with us, ”he conjectured.

Even so, he recalled that the vaccines produced against the new virus were created for a specific variant and that the appearance of new mutations is a phenomenon to avoid. For the expert, the variants should be isolated as much as possible so that “they did not cross and there were new mutations.”

“It would be prudent to have a common policy in the European Union to be very careful about the entry of new variants into the European space,” he said, adding that this policy should be complemented by a quarantine period on arrival and a new passenger test. especially from countries with new variants.

Regarding the vaccination plan, Filipe Froes admitted that he did not agree with the current criteria that define which are the priority groups and defended that Portugal should be guided by age criteria. That is, to vaccinate all people over 70 years of age, whose mortality, at this time, is 13%. “The age criterion is transparent and easier to manage,” he added.

The expert also defended the creation of mass vaccination centers and warned that “in most health centers” it will be unsustainable to maintain normal activity plus vaccination of the population. For these centers, nurses would be called outside of their working hours, for example on weekends or after shifts, so as not to compromise the activity of the health centers.

Finally, Filipe Froes said that “we have to improve our information and knowledge system”, because, after 10 months of the pandemic, we still have no idea of ​​its “real impact”. [por exemplo] know where the sick die. It is not difficult to know, it is in the death certificates, “he concluded.

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