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Portugal is doing more tests per 100,000 inhabitants per week than Italy, Sweden, Spain or Germany, indicating a greater effort to test more people. From the week of September 1 to the week of November 15 (most recent data), the proportion has increased to 2,616.4 weekly tests per 100 thousand inhabitants. In Italy and Spain, the values have even decreased.
But trying more is not the same as trying well. On November 14, the date of the last update from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Portugal reported 7.1 tests for each new positive case. Not enough, Our World in Data warns: the lower this value, the less suitable it is to be tested. For the World Health Organization, 10 to 30 tests per new positive case is considered a fair value.
In the opposite direction is the positive test rate, the higher the better. Portugal has around 14% positive tests, double that of the UK (7.44%), but considerably lower than countries such as Poland (47.7%) or Bulgaria (37.9%). Sweden did not enter the accounts, which did not report this data to the international health authorities.
Portugal has the lowest number of hospitalizations per million inhabitants
If in the first week of September Portugal had only 11.8 weekly admissions to Covid-19 per million inhabitants, the proportion rose to 37 in the week of November 15. Despite the concern about the pressure of Covid-19 on the National Health System, this is one of the best benefits among the countries of the European Union.
In Hungary, for example, the metric was 4678.6 in the week of November 15; in Poland it was 4019.8; And in Italy, where hospitals collapsed during the first wave of Covid-19, the figures are now 3,843.2 weekly admissions per million inhabitants. On the other hand, in Germany, which only reported data until the last week of October, the last balance stood at 14.1.
Despite the proportionality of the cases according to the population of each country, comparisons with this metric should be cautious, since the health system in each country may have different functions, that is, lower values of weekly hospitalizations per million inhabitants . It can still put too much pressure on the hospitals in that country.
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