The Overseas Situation Report Tuesday 1 February 2022
by Mike Evans
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
– Confucius
Whilst for many the pandemic has brought about changes to their lifestyles which will be difficult to go back to, there are many things which are carrying on as normal as possible. For many the introduction of Homeworking has given them the chance to get out of the morning commute and all the hassles that this exercise brought.
We now see many companies across the world have changed the way they work in order to adapt to these new practises. It is reported that large organisations are looking to downsize their corporate head offices in capital cities across the world due to the lack of work-based staff. However, on the other hand a lot of things have not changed.
Sports across the world have been largely continuing albeit without audiences for some time, but slowly the world has started to return to watching sport as a recreational activity, something that lockdowns during Covid times put a stop to unless you watched it on television.
However, one particular spectacle which is about to start is having to deal with the effects of Covid. The winter Olympics are due to start in Beijing very shortly and whilst the world has been dealing with their issues of Covid, The Chinese Government has been trying to keep a lid on it through some would feel draconian measures for its citizens.
Since early in the Pandemic, China has all but closed its doors to the outside world and has put millions of its citizens under quarantine to eradicate the virus. Whether they have succeeded is anyone’s guess as the reports that come out of China are very much controlled by the state.
91 Nations are represented at the Winter Olympics with 2871 competitors. The International Olympic Committee, organisers in Beijing, and the $2 billion global advertising machine swear that everything is going to be just fine this February: A “filtering” process of travellers into China’s draconian “zero-Covid” environment, followed by daily testing within a “closed loop” and country-specific precautions, will combine to create a triple-bubble of the 24th Winter Olympiad.
But listen to actual Olympians, as magazine Rolling Stone did in real talk with a cross-section of 17 prominent athletes this month, and you begin to comprehend a mutating pressure. After lifetimes preparing for their moment, the Omicron variant is following these young people around the world, straight into a maze of naked capitalism — of germs and depression and greed — that expects blind faith.
As potential cracks in the Chinese crackdown emerge, competitors at the Beijing Games will be expected to grin and bear it for the worldwide TV cameras while dreading that one positive test that could wipe them out from competition… and land them in a “medical prison” run by the state.
More than 175 cases have already surfaced from delegations arriving in China, including at least one snowboarder on Friday, with mounting concern that a wave of athletes could become infected next. Multiple Olympic executives acknowledge to Rolling Stone that on-the-ground organisers and national medical experts have internally discussed the contingency plan of a pause in the action, as the NHL did to take a look in the mirror when Omicron hit the United States in December and the league barred its players from Beijing.
Whilst many Athletes fear that a surge in case could stop the Games the IOC’s adaptive response to the variant with a patchwork of policies, seen through the eyes of the athletes surviving Beijing’s Omicron gauntlet in the spotlight, make it increasingly clear: Whenever the suits who run the Olympics see through the looking glass of our upside-down pandemic world, they determine that the games must go on, at any cost.
As touchdown began in earnest this week, athletes were getting tested en masse at Beijing International. (It’s the PCR throat swab this time.) To avoid needless interaction, they’re carrying their own suitcases. They’ve been shown to their seats on socially distanced buses run by the Chinese organising committee. (Bus and taxi drivers are trapped inside the bubble, too.) And then they’re off through the “processing centre” to wait up to six hours for test results inside the closed loop — a pandemic purgatory of isolation, action sports, and a nebulous nether region reserved for quarantine.
Full vaccination is all but mandated to enter this Olympic thunderdome; unvaxxed athletes and staff were required to complete a three-week quarantine upon arrival in Beijing. IOC officials and national medical officers describe the actual Daily life within the Olympic village as something like this: An athlete wakes up and finds coffee and a collection site for daily testing in the drab lobby of her apartment building in one of three Olympic villages, sub-divided by sport and then by delegation. Many teams have been eating lunch with rubber gloves for months, most of the teams were happy to hear that the dining-hall dividers for each delegation in the 2022 villages are at least see-through.
They might not be so happy to smell the leaning tower of Olympic rubbish, which Beijing organisers will keep stored within the bubble during the Games to “protect the health and safety of the Chinese people,” before mass-processing the garbage in what could amount to a literal dumpster fire.
During the past four days China has detected some 119 cases of COVID-19 among athletes and personnel linked to the Beijing Winter Olympics, with authorities imposing a “closed loop” bubble to keep participants, staff and media separated from the public.
The tally from the weekend showed 37 new cases on Sunday, and 34 on Saturday, with most testing positive after arrival at the airport, Games organisers said.
On Monday, Russian biathlete Valeria Vasnetsova said her own Olympic ambitions were over after testing positive twice following her arrival in Beijing, one of three Russian positive tests announced on Monday.
“Unfortunately, my Olympic dream will remain just a dream,” Vasnetsova wrote on social media. “Maybe one day I will find the strength to rise again but it will be a completely different story.”
Eight athletes or team officials were among 28 people who had tested positive on arrival at the airport on Sunday. International Olympic Committee member Emma Terho, who heads the IOC’s athletes commission, also tested positive and said she has been in isolation since the weekend.
“Even though this is not the start I envisaged, I was happy to see the protocols that Beijing 2022 has put in place are working well,” Terho, a retired Finnish ice hockey player, said on social media.
Whether these games have the same attraction to the sports enthusiast as previous games will not be known until the almost 3000 athletes have done their best to beat not only their competitors but also the virus. Which one wins is another story.
Until the next time stay safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – Total Cases Worldwide – 375,658,447
Total Deaths Worldwide – 5,683,192
Total Recovered Worldwide – 296,770,853
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 73,204,402 (19.4 % of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 302,454,045
Information and Resources:
Europe has recorded 9,629,074 new COVID-19 cases in the last seven days, the majority of which are Omicron cases, data by the World Health Organisation (WHO) show. European Union Member States top the table as the European countries with the highest number of cases. Yet, despite the numbers, some EU and Schengen Area countries are already facilitating restrictions by removing some measures which were imposed at the end of November 2021, when the existence of the Omicron virus variant was first detected in southern Africa.
Therefore, since the quarantine rule currently has little to no significance when it comes to halting the spread of the virus, starting from tomorrow, January 26, all unvaccinated and unrecovered travellers will be permitted entry to Norway without having to follow the quarantine requirement. Nonetheless, it has been emphasised that travellers who haven’t been vaccinated or recovered from the virus are still required to take a pre-entry test.
The Danish government has announced the end of domestic restrictions imposed due to Coronavirus, as the country no longer categorises the virus as a socially critical disease. The new rules will enter force on February 1, and, according to them, several restrictions such as wearing a face mask, presenting the vaccination certificate to enter leisure facilities, and following a curfew restriction will no longer apply.
On the other hand, unvaccinated travellers, as well as those who haven’t received an additional dose, will continue to be subject to the ten-day quarantine requirement unless they are part of the exemption list.
Although this puts Covid-19 into second place, it is not good news as far as this subject is concerned. Last Friday’s bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health (DGS) showed that 303 municipalities are at extreme risk of infection, that is, with more than 960 cases of covid-19 per 100 thousand inhabitants in 14 days.
Lastly the Instituto do Sangue da Transplantação (IPST) yesterday appealed for the contribution of all potential blood donors, at a “particularly demanding time” due to the covid-19 pandemic and in the face of “a great difficulty in maintaining stable blood and blood component supply reserves”. The current situation has “caused a large reduction in the number of donors and the postponement of previously scheduled collection sessions”.
“It is plausible that the region is reaching the end of the pandemic”, said the main official of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Europe, still urging caution, due to the unpredictability of the virus.
In 2021, the Portuguese Armed Forces accounted for a total of 27,741 effectives, excluding military personnel in the reserve situation out of service effectiveness. This number represents an increase of 1,007 employees compared to 2020, whose consolidated data recorded a total of 26,734 employees in that year, reinforcing the increase already seen in 2019 (26,569 employees). Considering this universe, the available numbers reveal a sustained growth in the last three years.
This Monday, in a city council session, the Municipality explains that it was unanimously decided to institute this measure in an area of 8.5 hectares in the area of the former Matos da Picota quarry, where the developer Blueotter Circular, SA intends to install a management unit for waste.
The Jewish Community of the Algarve (CJA) becomes the fourth official Jewish community in Portugal, having been registered as a Religious Collective Person (non-Catholic) on Tuesday, January 4, in the National Register of Legal Persons.
In a statement, the Navy indicated that the crew member, was rescued and transported by the Portuguese Air Force EH-101 aircraft to Horta airport, where he landed at around 11:20 am.
The WHO has for months demanded that countries do more to accelerate the distribution of vaccines in poorer nations, calling on all countries to vaccinate at least 70% of their populations by the middle of this year. Half of the WHO’s 194 member states missed the previous target of vaccinating 40% of their people by end-2021 and 85% of people in Africa were yet to receive a single jab, Dr Tedros said.
The Omicron variant, which studies have shown generally leads to less severe infection among vaccinated people than Delta, has raised long-awaited hopes that Covid-19 is starting to shift from a pandemic to a more manageable endemic illness like seasonal flu.
Meanwhile the EMA, European Medical Agency has warned of a new threat to citizens’ health away from Covid 19. Influenza has returned to Europe at a faster-than-expected rate this winter after almost disappearing last year, raising concerns about a prolonged “twindemic” with Covid-19 amid some doubts about the effectiveness of flu vaccines.
However, when we look at Europe and in particular Portugal the rise in new infections in the past week has been the fifth highest in the world. This is based on countries with more than 1 million in population and is the 7-day figure per 1 million of population. Denmark, France, Israel, and Slovenia are the countries with higher rates than Portugal. Denmark has a rate of 42,872 new cases per million, France has 38,475 cases, Israel has 37,171 and Slovenia has 33,790 cases per million of population. Portugal’s rate for the week was 33,186.
Spain is in a good position to open the debate, having one of the world’s highest vaccination rates with 90.5 per cent of its population over the age of 12 fully immunised. But the question has sparked disagreement between governments seeking some sort of normality and some parts of the medical community which advocate keeping its guard up. The country is working with the scientific community to eventually shift from “managing a pandemic to managing a disease which we hope science will reclassify as an endemic illness”, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said this week.
At the start of the pandemic, medical professionals advocated the use of masks were not conducive and did not protect people from the virus. But by April 2020, we had realised how important public masking could be. Because SARS-CoV-2 is spread by asymptomatic as well as symptomatic people, simply “staying home if you’re sick” doesn’t stop the virus’ spread; we need to protect each other from asymptomatic spreaders, too. Because the virus spreads by aerosols, simply maintaining a 6-foot distance from other people is insufficient; only with good masks can you stop breathing in the viral particles expelled by someone across the room. And although N95s and the equivalent are the most reliable, we have learned that even cloth masks can do a terrific job at filtering out the virus when good-fitting, well-made and appropriately used.
The SRS 24 helpline (Regional Health Service 
Pedro Ramos, Madeira’s Health and Civil Protection Secretary, said mass testing helped to protect the population after the arrival of the Omicron variant. However, he added that mass testing cannot take place for ever. Indeed, he stressed the most important thing is for the population to vaccinate against Covid-10
Portugal according to some forecasts is expected to reach the peak of the covid-19 pandemic between this Thursday and the following Monday. According to the calculations made by mathematicians from the Instituto Superior Técnico, at that time there will be about 45,000 diagnosed cases of infection and 40 deaths per day. Yesterday in fact there were just over 43,000 and 46 deaths so in terms of deaths slightly higher.
The above is one of the reasons why police (PSP and the GNR) have safe elderly programs here in Portugal checking regularly on the elderly living alone in isolated areas. It is important that we all do what we can through the various charities here, to help those in need, and in the case of elderly neighbours to check from time to time they are OK especially in this colder weather at present
In response to SAPO24, the PGR’s communication office confirms “the opening of an inquiry that runs under the Lisbon DIAP”.
In the resignation request, to which the Lusa agency had access, the 12 heads of the Internal Medicine team consider that “the current conditions do not allow to ensure care to patients with the quality and safety due” in the Emergency Department (SU) of the hospital of Beja, managed by the Baixo Alentejo Local Health Unit (ULSBA).
Of the 2,370 infraction notices, 1,561 were raised by the PSP, which controls passengers from flights originating in the Schengen area (European area of free movement of people), and 809 by the SEF, which inspects travellers from countries outside the Schengen area. .
On the island of São Miguel, 134 new positive cases in the municipality of Ponta Delgada, 96 in the municipality of Ribeira Grande, 21 in the municipality of Nordeste, 16 in the municipality of Povoação, 13 in the municipality of Lagoa and 12 in the municipality of Vila Franca do Campo.
The vaccination of children against covid-19 will start this week in the Azores on the island of São Miguel and Terceira, the vaccination of children aged between 5 and 11 will take place at vaccination centres on specific days and schedules. On the remaining islands, it will be carried out at health centres by appointment.
The reported situations concern flooding of houses and flooding of roads, with most of the occurrences being recorded in the municipality of Praia da Vitória, on Terceira Island.