The results of the management of covid-19 are known. The general confinement of 2020 has caused appalling damage to our social and economic structure.

Not enough, given the toughness of the last year, many of the toughest eventually break down. It is true that we are still far from imagining all the implications of the new reality. If after the first confinement we rushed to decree the impossibility of its repetition, the denial of confinement, which after all had not even occurred, a digital school in every home or the most equipped health services in the world, maybe now we should focus on the essentials: implement measures that avoid the need for new general confinement and mitigate the effects of the loss of access to health care.

There has always been an alternative to confinement. This strategy involves searching, testing and isolating. At this point, the number of contact trackers is essential. Not only to ensure that the thousands of epidemiological inquiries that remain unfulfilled are carried out, but also to promote isolation and provide data that allow us to act with knowledge. We arrived in October with less than one tracker for every twenty thousand inhabitants. Germany, in March 2020, already had one to four thousand inhabitants. According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, a 20-hour training will be enough to prepare a professional for this area. In addition, it is essential to increase and make available the testing capacity, so that it can be carried out in a timely manner and not postponed.

One final paragraph. We cannot continue to ignore the thousands of Portuguese who do not have access to healthcare. As if her past and future suffering were an inevitability. It is not! We cannot fail to implement, with the collaboration of all, priority programs for non-covid-19 patients.

#H Today is my weekly chronicle published in Newspaper on Wednesdays.

The full article can be read on here