By Catarina Demony
LISBON (Reuters) – Portugal’s firefighters, police, and people over 50 with pre-existing conditions will start getting COVID-19 jabs from next week, the government said on Monday, as it scrambled to contain soaring infection rates that are overwhelming hospitals.
Lawmakers and government ministers will also get vaccinated from next week, Health Minister Marta Temido said, while medical staff spoke of despair at the steep increase in cases.
The country of 10 million people, which fared better than others in the first wave of the pandemic, now has the world’s highest seven-day rolling average of new daily cases and deaths per million inhabitants, according to data tracker ourworldindata.org.
“Colleagues are worn out. They are completely worn out and some days they just feel like crying,” an ambulance worker told Reuters. She spoke anonymously for fear of losing her job if she gave her name, as her employer does not allow staff to talk to the media without permission.
“People have already died in ambulances and will continue to die because there is no capacity to respond,” she said, adding: “I recently took a patient to hospital and I had to wait two hours inside the ambulance … but I have colleagues who waited five, six, nearly seven hours.”
Last week, an elderly man died in an ambulance after a three-hour wait outside a hospital in the town of Portalegre. The week before, an 80-year-old man also died waiting for hours outside the Torres Vedras hospital.
Portuguese hospitals have said they are running out of beds for coronavirus and non-coronavirus patients.
“The excess pressure in hospitals is real,” Temido told a news conference, describing the situation as worrying.
“In many cases, hospitals have escalated their contingency plans to the maximum and gone beyond,” she said, adding that authorities were trying to set up more hospital beds and may move hospitalised people to their homes where possible to free up space.
Temido said that Portugal has so far received around 411,600 doses of coronavirus vaccines but only 255,700 doses have been administered so far to frontline health workers and care home residents. The ambulance worker Reuters spoke to had received her first vaccination dose and was waiting for the second one.
(Reporting by Catarina Demony, Victoria Waldersee and Sergio Goncalves; Editing by Ingrid Melander and Philippa Fletcher)
