With hospitals struggling to cope with habitual winter demands, flu is back in the headlines with warnings that 80% of people who end up in intensive care in hospitals “have not been vaccinated”.
These claims are invariably taken on face value, with little in the way of additional information. Are the people admitted into intensive care already chronically ill? Are they morbidly obese? Old/ frail? All that we are told is that they are “unvaccinated” – and that vaccination is the key “for many of these cases to not have to seek hospital treatment”.
The sources stressing this information are invariably those working within the overstretched state health service, which every year has very similar problems.
This year particularly televisions have been concentrating on the ‘waiting times’ for people arriving in hospitals to be attended by a doctor: 10 hours/ 15 hours/ 12 hours – the numbers are repeated again and again, but they generally refer to hospitals in busy urban areas. Regions may be slightly better off: it all depends on doctors’ availability which over Christmas and the New Year are reduced further by ‘seasonal holidays’.
Today’s bulletins are telling us that ‘A&E departments maintain above recommended waiting times due to the increase in cases of flu which have still not reached their peak’.
Some urban area hospitals are already operating contingency arrangements, but as Carlos Robalo Cordeiro, director of pneumology at Coimbra ULS (local health unit) has told SIC, the problem is not flu cases per se, but the lack of human resources available to deal with the increasing influx. “We are always prepared,” he stressed. “But resources are scarce and this is the main problem. For all the contingency plans and levels, while we do not have more (human) resources in our hospitals, things will be difficult.”
This is where the entreaties for people to ‘get vaccinated’ come in. This year’s flu vaccine is not a perfect match for the strains of flu virus predominant but it is seen as potentially reducing people’s symptoms.
Flu or Covid-19: which is worrying SNS the most?
Virologist Pedro Simas tells SIC that flu is the worry, much more than Covid-19 which has now become an endemic coronavirus “as we predicted (…) which causes a common cold like other coronavirus”.
It is always “more desirable” to have people vaccinated against the flu than against Covid-19, stresses Simas – adding that right now there are more than two million people in Portugal covered by the current flu vaccine. Ideally, he says, everyone over the age of 65 should receive an annual flu shot.
Simas was always a voice of calm in the days of the pandemic, and this time round he has kept up the measured narrative: yes, the flu situation will get worse before it gets better in Portugal, “but it is not going to be anything alarming or catastrophic…”
That said, the rest of the panel interviewed by SIC – all of them working within the overstretched SNS health service – appealed for people to get vaccinated against the flu.
Robalo Cordeiro added that “last week, 80% of the people being treated in intensive care units had not been vaccinated…”
Source: SIC Notícias
