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When everyone was sent home due to the pandemic, Graça Freitas was “quarantined” at DGS, where she worked 15 hours a day. The day she resumed her usual tour, she discovered that she was no longer an anonymous citizen.
It is a rare day in which Graça Freitas has not appeared in the media since the beginning, in March, of the covid-19 pandemic in Portugal. It has become one of the main actors in the fight against a disease that has already caused 3,181 deaths in the country in 198,011 confirmed cases of infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
In an interview with the Lusa agency, the doctor who formally succeeded, on January 2, 2018, Francisco George in the direction of the General Directorate of Health (where he had been acting temporarily since the previous year and where he had previously been deputy general director) ) confessed that it took him “some time” to get an idea of the media coverage he was getting.
“It took me a while to realize this because it is such a confusion that we live in, and the first days were so intense, that it was more of a task, one more thing and there was not enough time to get an idea of this exhibition”, Graça Freitas, 63, said.
When the state of emergency was declared and the Portuguese were confined at home, this did not happen at the DGS: “We had the quarantine on the contrary, which was in the workplace,” he recalled.
“We spent 12, 14, 15 hours in the workplace. I did not have the external perception that I was a person who had entered the lives of others for better or for worse,” said the public health specialist.
For Graça Freitas, “the first moment of shock” came with the end of the “quarantine” and she had “extraordinary free minutes” to go out on her usual walk.
“I realized for the first time that I was very exposed and that I had lost the right to be an anonymous citizen,” she said, recalling that the moment “was so disturbing” that she returned home.
“I walked 300, 400 meters and I came home because it was a strange feeling,” he said, noting that it was not because he felt some kind of aggression from people, on the contrary, but that it was not “programmed for this level of exposure” .
“I followed a discreet career, it does not mean that I did not appear from time to time, but it was more in the rear than in the front. But that was the first phase and then I realized that there was nothing to do,” acknowledged the physician who dealt with various public health emergencies.
The fact that she described herself as “very pragmatic” also helped her in this task: “When there is no remedy, it had to be. It was necessary to hold a press conference a day, it was done,” and added: “It is at this stage where I am still “.
But the CEO separates exposure from intrusion: “When we start to realize that people are actually making judgments about ourselves, it’s not always easy,” he said.
“There are people who prepare themselves throughout this life for this type of intrusion because they have high exposure professions, because they are politicians, they are actors or they are public figures, by choice and, therefore, this intrusion issue is complex”, Graça assumed. Freitas.
But, once again, he considered, what he considers to have been pragmatism, resistance and resilience prevailed: “If my work involves talking to people, I do the best I know how and what I can,” he affirmed, despite “the people who say wrong “and some” are fair “and others” are unfair “.
“Obviously, I don’t like injustices very much, but they also depend on where they come from. I value some more than others and somehow I see this as a kind of role that I have had to play,” he said, reinforcing: “There are criticisms that they are “deeply unfair and some even malicious.”
“Perhaps a specific injustice hurts more coming from someone who I consider much more than a pattern of repetition, saying the same things, which I am sure they themselves know are not exactly the truth,” he said, noting that his concern is that DGS employees “do not be infected or discouraged by this type of criticism.”
On the balance sheet of Graça Freitas, since January 21 they have been making a “huge effort”, and they have not stopped, adding: “I am absolutely sure of what I am saying, because we have done a serious, very serious work that deserved consideration” . by some people. “
“In relation to me, cataloging on this spectrum that they are malicious, premeditated and that they have an objective, I manage to put them in a box and think: I do not value them more than exactly what they have and I end up dealing well with what”, he declared,
Graça Freitas, the second woman to hold the position of Director General of Health in more than a century, said that she has not yet had time to think about how future generations will analyze her work, but in the meantime she is devalued: “I have the Notion of that I will be linked to the pandemic, but in two, three, four years we will have another pandemic and other actors ”, he concluded.
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