There are practically 5,000 Portuguese who have tested positive for COVID-19 that the Directorate-General for Health does not know where they are. This difference was noticed after an analysis of the numbers presented this Tuesday in the bulletin released by DGS. There, 44,143 positive cases are attributed to the different counties in the country, but the total number of infected people is practically 49 thousand, which represents a difference of 4,675 people, to which DGS does not attribute a municipality, as it does not know where these people are. . In this DGS bulletin, only municipalities with 3 or more infected for confidentiality reasons are presented, advances the magazine “Saturday“. It is known that almost 10% of confirmed cases of COVID-19 come from external laboratories and are not integrated into the National Epidemiological Surveillance System (SINAVE), which makes it impossible to know where these people are. However, this gap does not has an explanation.
Despite the fact that the daily bulletins warn that the list “may not correspond to all cases per municipality”, DGS was not able to specify why the percentage of cases found by SINAVE, hence the list of municipalities was removed from the daily bulletins, as it revealed to “Saturday”.
A similar situation has occurred in the cases of the North (which registered 18,356 cases on July 14, but only about 16,700 cases were allocated to municipalities, with more than 1,500 remaining to be allocated), of the Center (which registered 4,361, but only about 4,001 in municipalities. ), Alentejo (which recorded 635 cases but only about 550 in municipalities), the Algarve (which registered 709 but only about 700 in municipalities), the Azores (which had 152 cases but registered only about 110 in municipalities) and Madeira (which recorded 102 cases but only 96 in municipalities), according to the same magazine. In all regions the percentage of cases in which the municipality is unknown is around 10%.
The operation of SINAVE, in which doctors notify a case and it is automatically registered in the region where the infected person is notified (even if it is not the place of residence), may be the explanation for this data difference, which still thus, at the national level, they are correct.
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