The doctor António Pais Lacerda, director of the Internal Medicine II service at Hospital Santa Maria, in Lisbon, warns that the fear of losing a salary or job leads people infected with the new coronavirus to hide their situation.
“There are parents who are infected at home and take their children to school and say nothing to anyone” and “people who continue to go to their work with someone at home sick and do not say it because they are afraid of being on less pay or less capacity to take bread home ”, which turns out to be“ a very serious social situation ”, reports the director of the service where patients with covid-19 and those suspected of contracting the infection are hospitalized in the infirmary.
António Pais Lacerda warns that people have to “take the necessary precautions” and if they know that they were around someone infected, they should be careful to say that they will be quarantined at home.
“It is not to say, I was with that person who was infected, but I will not do anything because I feel good. This is nonsense, because it is what keeps the contamination from others ”, the internist doctor in a statement to Lusa in the service he runs.
As it is not yet known when there will be a vaccine, “the responsibility belongs to everyone, but it belongs to everyone in the sense that no one is to blame, but everyone has to stop this, because if not, within a short time, too many will enter in hospitals ”.
“If we have 200 or 300 cases in one day, maybe one or two will enter the hospital. If we have 2,000, maybe more will enter the hospitals and if we have 5,000, there will be a lot more and suddenly there will be no number of beds ”for the covid-19 patients, nor for the other patients.
At some point you will eventually have to think about whether it is necessary to use private hospital beds, for example to assist patients without covid-19 or eventually make “special tents to increase the number of beds even outside normal hospital locations”.
“All this has already been done and is being done abroad” and “we have to avoid it and that is in the washed hands of each one and in the mask of each one”, he stresses.
In his view, it is necessary to elucidate the population with real cases and show that it is not a disease that affects only the elderly.
“Our greatest number of hospitalizations is from the age of 70, but we have had hospitalizations of people around the age of 30, 50 and in recent times more”, he stresses.
The expert believes that the media talk a lot about this aspect, but they talk more with numbers, and that doesn’t reach people.
“People are tired of seeing numbers: there are 200 more, 2,500 and 3,000 more, the barrier has passed. At a certain point, people no longer know what that means and turn off their thinking about it ”, he observes.
For the doctor, a large part of the population has already “stopped calling”, exemplifying with young people, who think that the disease hardly affects them.
Regardless of having no symptoms or having mild symptoms, young people should think that they can transmit the disease “to others, who are parents, grandparents, etc.”, says António Pais Lacerda, leaving his testimony: “This is what we we see here ”.
The covid-19 pandemic has already claimed more than 1.1 million deaths and more than 44.5 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report made by the French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 2,428 people died from 132,616 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health.
