LISBON (Reuters) – The Portuguese public health system is on the verge of collapse as hospitals in the areas most affected by a worrying increase in coronavirus cases are rapidly running out of intensive care beds to treat COVID-19 patients.
“Our health system is under extreme pressure,” Health Minister Marta Temido told reporters on Sunday afternoon after a visit to a hospital in trouble. “There is a limit and we are very close.”
The health system, which had the lowest number of intensive care beds per 100,000 inhabitants in Europe before the pandemic, can accommodate up to 672 COVID-19 patients in intensive care units or ICUs, according to data from the Ministry of Health.
According to health authority DGS, the number of people in ICUs with COVID-19 was 647 on Sunday. The Portuguese Association of Hospital Administrators said the number of coronavirus patients needing hospitalization is likely to increase dramatically in the coming week.
Three days after a nationwide lockdown, the country of just 10 million people reported 10,385 new cases and 152 fatalities on Sunday, bringing the total number of infections to 549,801, with a death toll rising to 8,861.
According to the ourworldindata.org website supported by the University of Oxford, Portugal had the highest number of coronavirus cases per capita in Europe in the past seven days.
Most of the new cases were concentrated in Lisbon, where many patients in the city’s public hospitals have already been transferred elsewhere, including to health departments in the country’s second-largest city, Porto.
“We are already treating patients above our installed capacity,” said Daniel Ferro, director of the largest Santa Maria hospital in Lisbon. “And we are not the only hospital where this is happening.”
The Garcia de Orta Hospital, just across the Tagus River from Lisbon, said in a statement that the hospital could soon enter a “pre-catastrophe” phase as it no longer has beds for coronavirus patients.
Reporting by Catarina Demony; Editing by Jonathan Oatis