Altamiro da Costa Pereira, coordinator of CINTESIS and director of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP)), summarizes some reflections and recommendations “to those who have the responsibility to fight the current health war that we are all experiencing”.
As he writes in the Público newspaper, the first measure is the physical and social distance, which “could have an enormous effect in stopping or slowing the epidemic, thus constituting our greatest hope and bet to avoid a real disruption of our health system, with serious consequences for mortality not only in patients infected with COVID-19 but perhaps even more among all other patients who continue, at this very moment, in need of regular and differentiated medical care, such as cancer patients or hemodialysis patients “.
The second recommendation goes towards the urgent establishment of an “operational command structure” and the third refers to the provisional transformation of the Ministry of Health into a “true Ministry of War or National Defense” with a “well-defined command line” to “better articulate all the possible actors involved in this war, from public and private entities to business or voluntary organizations, in the area of health, logistics, municipal or industrial”.
Read more (in Portuguese).