Today’s DGS Covid bulletin is perhaps yet further indication that it’s time to monitor SARS-CoV-2 differently, as the experts keep saying.
Almost every municipality in the country is showing “maximum” levels of contagion (meaning over 960 cases per 100,000; some are showing more than six times that amount).
In the ‘old days’ of the pandemic, this would have been terrifying. But with Omicron it is just not terrifying: most of the people isolating are asymptomatic. Thousands of ‘apparently perfectly healthy children’ are missing out on classes simply because mandatory testing found them to be positive. This is no way to run a society – and SIC television news today has already started discussing “countries that have started to draw up provisory plans for when Covid-19 becomes endemic” (which many would say it already is).
As election day looms, Portugal has 425 910 people isolating. That is almost half a million. It’s not surprising the decision has been made to let people out to vote: the elections couldn’t go ahead democratically if they weren’t.
Today has seen another leap in hospital admissions: there are now 2,044 people in the nations hospitals with the worst effects of Covid-19, 162 in ICUs.
A total of 49 deaths have been attributed to the virus in the last 24-hours – the highest number since the end of last February. But, according to specialists, we are in the four-day window where Omicron will be peaking (click here). If forecasts hold true this level of death will be short-lived.
Incidence, calculated over a 14-day average, is running at 4674 cases per 100,000, while transmission has been falling and is pegged at 1.1.
For today’s bulletin, which gives a list of levels of transmission in every municipality, click here.
