Portugal: Structural weaknesses of nursing homes network exposed by the pandemic

Abstract

This chapter is about the COVID-19 pandemic in long term care residences (LTCR) in Portugal from 2 March 2020, to 15 July 2020. It was a dramatic period in which Portuguese society faced a threat unprecedented in the memory of people and institutions, about which little or nothing was known.

One of the most disconcerting facts that occurred was how the pandemic spread to the elderly and, in particular, those who were institutionalised in LTCR. However, this being the focus, we will only deviate from the topic and the fixed period when there is a need to frame them, namely regarding the pandemic's evolution and the LTCR network's evolution.

Although the period under analysis in this chapter is the four and a half months between 2 March 2020, when the first case of infection was detected, and 15 July 2020, when the first cycle of the pandemic ended, it is worth looking at its evolution from a broader perspective. This perspective reveals a much higher incidence of the disease after autumn 2020 than until then, as shown in Figure 13.1. The daily new cases recorded by the Directorate-General for Health were 53 per day at the beginning of March 2020, increasing to around 350 per day by July of the same year and coming close to 750 cases per day in early October 2020. At that time, a wave of large proportions emerged, reaching a peak of almost 7,000 cases per day in mid-November and 15,000 per day in late January 2021. There are two crucial phenomena to register: first, the relationship between policies, population behaviour, and how people perceive the evolution of SARS-COV2 infections.