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Portugal appears completely “painted” in red in the latest map of the risk of infection by the new coronavirus, which was updated this Thursday by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The five regions of mainland Portugal, Madeira and now also the Azores do not escape the classification of maximum risk of transmission of covid-19 in this map that uses a kind of traffic light and was created after the European Union decided to adopt uniform criteria to set travel restrictions. In the last update, a week ago, the autonomous region of the Azores was shown in yellow (intermediate risk).
But almost all the countries considered, in addition to the Member States, the map includes the UK, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, are currently in red. Based on the data updated this Thursday, Portugal already has a cumulative incidence rate in the last two weeks higher than that of Spain (620.8 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 599.1), despite being far from the countries that lead this list (Czech Republic, Luxembourg and Belgium, which have more than 1,000 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants). For the risk classification, three combined indicators are considered: the incidence rate, the tests per 100,000 inhabitants and the percentage of positive tests.
The new European map is known on the day that the Order of Doctors (OM), after a meeting of its crisis office for covid-19, proposed that the possibility of moving to “selective confinements” be considered by NUTS (territorial units ) at the regional level and for periods of at least two to three weeks, taking into account the enormous disparity in the cumulative incidence rate and so that it is possible to “maintain activity, adjusted to the level of risk, of the primary and secondary sector, trade of basic necessities, nurseries and preschool and primary education ”.
The Prime Minister also admitted that it will be necessary to proceed to the staggering of the measures since there are very different situations between the different provinces and added that this will be requested from the General Directorate of Health (DGS). At the end of the Council of Ministers this Thursday, António Costa stressed that there are regions with just over 240 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants (accumulated value in the last 14 days), while there are others with a substantially higher value, and not therefore, the restrictive measures are the same. There is a municipality, he emphasized, in which the cumulative incidence rate amounts to “3,698 new cases.”
As many mayors have done in recent days, the OM has once again demanded that municipalities disclose the data of new cases that the DGS has stopped publishing in the last two weeks. The OM maintains that these detailed data allowed early intervention in the “current municipalities in a state of emergency” that present “a wide range of epidemiological indicators.”
The last time DGS updated this data – and it was supposed to do so every Monday – was October 26, claiming that “a reformulation of the indicators for new cases of Covid-19 is being carried out.” “It is intended that this is the main metric used in the risk assessment of each municipality so that the public can follow the evolution of the pandemic in the municipalities,” adds the DGS, which foresees that this data will be released this Friday.
