Rui CarmoA little over a month since my last update on how COVID is panning out in Portugal, I think it’s time to have another look at things.
This series began 50 days after the start of the pandemic and has had irregular updates 120, 200-ish, 250-ish, 300-ish, 320-ish, 333, one year, 420, 500 and 600 days later
- Cases start climbing unmistakably for a month or so
- Government fails to be proactive until it’s obvious they have to call for another medical experts meeting to allay public concern
- A week after that meeting states the obvious (we’re going into another wave) the government finally starts doing something, which mostly consists of meeting with political parties over another week.
- We eventually get half-baked measures that would actually have been useful a month ago and that are excessively bland in order to try to keep the economy going
This time it was just stupid:
- We go back to mandatory indoor mask use in a week (as if it wasn’t something we shoUld have started - or rather, kept - doing a long while back)
- Stricter airport controls (mostly for show, although there is a fair amount of concern about the new South African variant, and we have constant comings and goings from neighboring countries as part of our national heritage).
- A hilarious travesty about vaccination certificates being mandatory in hospitality and events (which will amount to zero actual effectiveness).
- A 2-week buffer after New Year with mandatory work from home and school/bar closures (after all the partying and infecting has already been done).
Plus, of course, tentative noises about further vaccination for younger children (which is another slow-moving train wreck that should have been dealt with in September).
The amazing thing about all of these is that they are, by and large, things we should have done two months ago as precautionary measures.
The only saving grace here is that vaccination does work (at least in preventing ICU overrun), and that we’re already doing boosters for 65+ folk.
But even there we should be doing more, and we lack data on the number of people who are both vaccinated and infected with milder symptoms–which is kind of essential to understanding the way the pandemic is evolving.
So yep, unfortunately I was right in the sense that we’re going to have a reprise (albeit minimized) of last year’s holiday season bumbling. Buckle up, it’s not going to be easy.