Drama in the Western Europe: The situation is rather tense, and people are nervous

Drama in the Western Europe: The situation is rather tense, and people are nervous

The growing number of patients in seven days has literally exploded, currently amounting to almost 850 new infections per 100.000 inhabitants. About 43 percent of all known infections and 44 percent of all deaths since the outbreak of the pandemic were recorded only in January 2021, the health services of this country stated, as Deutsche Welle reports.

The situation is "very tense", confirmed Reinhard Neumann, the head of the Lisbon office of the German organization "Friedrich Ebart". "The entire population is very nervous, considering that this dramatic development of the situation has been going on for the last two or three weeks," he said.

The government cited mutated strains of the virus, which first appeared in the UK, as the reason for the escalation, but also the weakening of restrictive measures during the Christmas holidays.

Strict lockdown with closed schools, shops and restaurants, as well as restrictions on movement, is in force again. Travel is also prohibited. Ambulances sometimes had to wait for hours before they could transport patients to crowded hospitals, reports DW correspondent from Portugal Jan-Philipp Scholz.

With about 850 patients across the country, the intensive care units are almost completely filled, and about 6.700 patients are hospitalized in other hospital wards.

Triage tents have been set up in front of some clinics: in them, doctors decide which of the new patients should be the first to receive medical care based on the amount of oxygen in the patient's blood and his body temperature.

Tents were set up in an accelerated procedure so that additional patients could be admitted.

In the fight against this wave of the coronavirus, the biggest problem is probably the lack of staff. The Portuguese government said on Friday that 70 percent of medical staff were infected with the coronavirus. The German army sent a team of 26 people on Wednesday, including eight doctors who will stay there for three weeks now. The transport plane also transferred 50 respirators, 150 infusion devices and 150 hospital beds.

As for vaccination against coronavirus, in the Portuguese media it is marked as a "symbolic start" because there are not enough vaccines in Portugal either. About 800.000 citizens out of a total of ten million are planned to be vaccinated by the end of March. Those responsible are therefore counting on the continued spread of the virus, while putting up great efforts to stop it, writes DW.