AMADORA, Portugal (AP) – Tears well up in Diana Correia’s eyes as she remembers the day in October when 24 of the 55 residents of her old people’s home in Portugal tested positive for COVID-19.
The amazing discovery sparked a fight to promote the house’s emergency plan and strengthen safety procedures. With some employees sent into solitary confinement, others worked in double shifts of up to 16 hours in full protective equipment, leaving them dressed in sweat and tired. Some of the occupants of the house, suddenly locked in their rooms or on their floor, were puzzled and constrained by restrictions, even trying to take the elevator and escape from prison.
“These were hard times,” says Correia, trying hard to stay calm. “Very hard times.”
As a resurgence of the autumn pandemic seemed to overwhelm the homes of Portuguese elderly people like Correia, and the country’s public health service struggled to cope, the government mobilized all the resources it could. This included the deployment of military units.
Soldiers’ mission: Get out of the country to visit hundreds of nursing homes and help defend yourself against the pandemic.
Long-term care units proved vulnerable around the world during the pandemic. The age of their residents, their physical proximity inside what is essentially a big house and the health problems that underlie the residents put them in danger. Moreover, nursing home staff in Portugal typically work in several different nursing homes and travel with each other by public transport.
Noting that international data on COVID-19 deaths at home is “imperfect and limited”, a study conducted in 21 countries by the international network of long-term care policies in London, which includes scientific researchers, found In October, the average share of these homes among coronavirus deaths was about 46%.
The European Center for Disease Control, an EU agency that monitors 31 countries, said in the same month that up to 66% of all fatal COVID-19 cases were among nursing home residents.
By this measure, Portugal did not do badly. Deaths at home as of Dec. 14 accounted for 30 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the country, the General Directorate of Health told The Associated Press.
On Friday, Portugal’s total deaths reached nearly 6,000.
In late September, fearing misfortune, the Portuguese government sent a distress call to its military. In addition to helping to find contacts, disinfect buildings and secure beds for hundreds of virus patients at military hospitals, the armed forces have now been asked to strengthen the protection of the nursing home.
Dr. Maria Salazar, a doctor and colonel in the Portuguese Air Force, quickly developed a nationwide training program for home care staff at work. The program also provides staff who receive the specific medical advice they need in almost daily online question-and-answer sessions with physicians, nurses, and pharmacists.
Within a week, the program was launched, coordinated from the CECOM military operations command center near Lisbon.
About 140 teams of one to three people, taken from the Portuguese army, navy and air force, have traveled across the country since early October. They were already in more than half of the 2,770 care homes targeted.
Salazar, a 49-year-old gastroenterologist, says the military presence is reassuring to nursing home staff and residents who have been frightened by the threat of the virus and desperately lacking medical knowledge.
“Suddenly, all these employees … felt like they didn’t know what they were doing and were scared to death,” says Salazar.
At the root of tangled decision-making is simply fear. “I identified that very clearly,” she says.
In a first phase, the troops go personally to the old people’s homes and hold discussions with slide presentations that go through the rudimentary rules of cooking, laundry, cleaning and social distancing. This is COVID-19 101.
Correia, the technical director of an old people’s home of the AFID charity in Amadora, just north of Lisbon, admits that it is nothing that her staff has not heard many times before. The difference is who the instructions come from.
“It’s an outside voice, a military voice with all the weight it carries,” she says.
In a recent afternoon session at the AFID house, 10 of Correia’s employees listened intently to the sergeant. Ari Silva of the 2nd Lancers Regiment, whose barracks are nearby. Wearing a military suit, a beret and an olive green mask, Silva asked the audience how many times they washed their hands that day. A man sitting in front said four.
Silva was not impressed: “Friend, I did at least double,” he said.
The benefits of military presence are as psychological as they are practical, says Correia, 38.
“We feel like someone out here is worrying about us,” she said. “We’re not just concerned about ourselves.”
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