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The infiologist Jaime Nina defended, this Sunday, that it is necessary to quadruple the supply of public transport to allow the necessary distance between passengers, considering that they are a “hotspot” for the transmission of covid-19.
“Public transport is one of the nerve centers of transmission,” he said, arguing that “to maintain distance, buses, trains and the Metro must have lines, yes, lines with passengers.
But for that it was necessary “to have four times as many wagons, buses and four times as many drivers and drivers,” said the Egas Moniz Hospital infectiologist in an interview with the Lusa agency, about the worsening of the epidemiological situation of covid-19.
If this solution had started to be considered in May, there would have been time to reinforce the fleet and have “enough drivers and drivers”. “Is it expensive? Yes, but having a closed economy is no longer expensive,” he questioned, arguing that “just one week of closed economy to try to avoid [a propagação do vírus] I paid for everything and there was still a lot of money left. “
The expert regretted that there is no “global approach” and that “sector by sector” is being seen, predicting “a problem with winter”.
“While in summer people avoid public transportation, they have their windows open, if it rains a lot I don’t see anyone in a car with the windows open, or walking a lot down the street when they can take the bus,” he said. the professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Faculty of Medical Sciences.
Regarding the evolution of the epidemic, Jaime Nina said that it is already in the second “wave”: “August was a bit wet, there was rain, and that soon had repercussions throughout Europe, not only in Portugal.”
But at this point, it is reaching more young people, a situation that it said is related to the increase in tests: “they are catching infected people who were not caught three months ago because they had a milder disease, and as such, lethality.” it is going down because there are more mild cases. “
The infectiologist welcomed the increase in testing, but said it has been “very slow” and “a long way from what should be done.”
In this regard, he made a football analogy: “the tactic that Portugal and Europe are using is as if they called the 10 outfield players all in front of the goal with their eyes closed trying to touch the ball and not let it pass.”
“It was much preferable to run down the field after the ball” and try to catch and control it.
It exemplified what countries like Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea are doing at the testing level to detect mild cases and cut transmission chains.
“Portugal did around two million tests, Singapore reaches almost 100 million for a population slightly smaller than ours“he said, noting that, according to data from the World Health Organization, Portugal has more than 1900 deaths and Singapore has 27, with a substantially equal number of cases.
In your opinion, “There are many flaws in case tracking and forwarding.“because” the Ministry of Health uses almost exclusively its own resources. “
“So there are no doctors or public health technicians, there are no molecular biology laboratories when there are a large number of people available,” he said.
In April and May, he said, “when everyone was distressed because there was no capacity to do all the tests,” the molecular biology laboratories of the Universidade Nova were closed with people who worked remotely, although the university made them available. .
On the other hand, they could call the medical students: “It was good for them because they were doing useful and relevant work for their course and obviously it was good for the Ministry of Health because it tripled or quadrupled the manpower needed to do case monitoring “.
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