(5 Nov 2020) A Portuguese infectious disease expert expressed his concerns on Thursday about the rising number of coronavirus patients in hospitals as the country edged closer towards a state of emergency.
Fernando Maltez has during his almost 40-year career helped prepare the country's contingency plans for such health threats as Ebola, SARS and the H1N1 influenza virus.
With a recent spurt in COVID-19 cases threatening to overwhelm Portugal's public health system, he notes a difference in the fight against this new coronavirus.
"The big difference is that this is never-ending. There's no end in sight," Maltez said at the infectious disease ward he oversees at Lisbon's Curry Cabral Hospital.
In the seven months from early March through the end of September, Portugal officially counted some 25-thousand cases of COVID-19.
In the month of October, it counted around 55-thousand.
"No health service in the world ... can withstand a deluge of cases that just keeps coming," Maltez told The Associated Press on Thursday.
He fears the pandemic may "snowball."
Maltez's comments came as Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa on Thursday proposed declaring a state of emergency from next Monday through to November 23, "due to the presence of a situation of public calamity."
Declaring a state of emergency would grant the government the legal right to enforce more drastic limits on people's freedoms, such as curfews or lockdowns.
It was expected to easily win parliament's approval amid a new sense of alarm.
Maltez, 65, sits on the Portuguese government's pandemic task force.
He directs medical staff who wear full-body white protective clothing as they duck in and out of negative pressure rooms where acute and highly contagious cases are cared for.
The doors of the rooms have signs taped on them saying, "STOP - High Risk of Contagion."
The blue vinyl flooring along the corridor has faded to pale blue after being washed with bleach so often.
In the last three weeks the ward "was under a lot of pressure" as new patients kept arriving, Maltez says.
The secretary of state for health, Antonio Lacerda Sales, has said that 87% of Portugal's 373 ICU beds set aside for COVID-19 patients are now occupied.
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