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The Minister of Health, Marta Temido, said today that technical work is being carried out to allow anyone in compulsory confinement due to covid-19 to vote in the presidential elections in January 2021.
Asked if there are already guidelines for collecting votes at the home of confined persons, Marta Temido said that the procedures to be adopted for the January 24 elections are being developed by a working group.
The working group is made up of representatives of the Auxiliary State and Health Secretariats, Internal Administration and the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Internal Administration, in addition to the participation of other services of the Ministry of Health, namely, the General Directorate of Health . Health and Shared Services of the Ministry of Health.
The group has been working on the operationalization of the electoral process and the vote of the voters who, at the time of the elections, are in a compulsory confinement regime and intend to exercise their right.
“We continue working to guarantee the conditions for them to do so,” he said, adding that “it is a technical work that is still in process.”
The minister spoke at the press conference about the evolution of the pandemic in Portugal, and was also asked to comment on a report by the TSF, according to which more than 70 years ago there were not as many deaths as this year.
Data released today by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) indicate that, from the date the first cases of covid-19 were diagnosed (March 2) and November 29, 87,792 deaths were registered, 10,776 more than in the same period of the previous year. the last five years, 41.8% of which due to covid-19.
The minister said that these are figures that she has been reading “carefully”, but reiterated that only after coding all the causes of death and at the end of 2020, could a “finer and more detailed analysis” of the causes of death be made.
“At this moment, what we do is an assessment of what the expected mortality was and what the actually verified mortality was and we know that there are four periods in which the observed mortality behavior is higher than the expected mortality,” he said.
He pointed out that the first moment is related to “the peak of covid-19”, then there are two moments related to extreme temperature phenomena, and now there is “a fourth moment of excess mortality from all causes.”
The minister assured that all the institutions of the Ministry of Health have been following these phenomena for many years and have an interest in clarifying them, analyzing them and looking for their foundations to avoid repeating the circumstances that are controllable.
“It is a job that requires time, that requires analysis and that at this moment only gives us what is the behavior of reality in relation to certain trend lines, it does not give us more information,” he emphasized.
He also said that he wanted to know if the excess mortality could result from the absence of other medical care to clarify if the National Health Service and all the institutions of the Portuguese health system have implemented all the procedures so that it is safe to use them in these cases. new circumstances.
He also left a call for people to use the NHS with confidence and wishes that in the “short term” he can resume normal and scheduled activity in places where this was not yet possible.
The covid-19 pandemic has caused more than 1.5 million deaths worldwide since December last year, including 5,373 in Portugal.
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