LISBON (Reuters) – Portugal’s daily death toll from the new coronavirus reached a record high of 167 on Monday, bringing the total to 9,028 deaths since the start of the pandemic, health authority DGS said.
The country of 10 million people, which has been under lockdown since last week to stem the spread of the virus, also reported a record 664 coronavirus patients in intensive care, just below the 672 maximum allocation of ICU beds out of a total of just over 1,000 in Portugal, according to health authorities.
Amid concerns over low compliance with lockdown rules, Portuguese hospitals are trying to cope with soaring contagion, with Portugal now the country with the highest rolling average of new cases over the last seven days per million inhabitants, according to ourworldindata.org website.
DGS added 6,702 new cases on Monday, bringing the cumulative tally infections to 556,503.
“The impact is huge because the number of beds doesn’t increase, the walls are not expandable and health workers are not multiplying,” Antonio Pais de Lacerda, a doctor at Lisbon’s biggest hospital, Santa Maria, where most ICU beds are occupied by coronavirus patients, told Reuters.
Portugal, which emerged from the first wave of the pandemic with fewer infections and deaths than most European countries, has already nearly doubled the overall number of ICU beds since the start of the pandemic, when it had just 528 critical care beds and Europe’s lowest ratio per 100,000 inhabitants.
Lisbon’s streets were busier than expected on Monday morning, with authorities preparing new restrictions after warnings that people were not complying with the measures, such as the mandatory rule to work from home.
“You see a lot of people not following (the rules) during this new lockdown,” Anabela Ribeiro, 55, said as she walked out a busy train station in the heart of the capital. “Stricter measures are needed.”
(Reporting by Catarina Demony, Miguel Pereira and Patricia Vicente Rua, Editing by Andrei Khalip and Timothy Heritage)
