Thanks to Dietmar Weiß for this latest summery.
Fortunately, the significant decrease in the Covid incidence in Portugal has continued over the past two weeks. The 7-day incidence has fallen below 1.000 on a national level, approximately reaching the values we had last Christmas.
However, it is a bit worrying that the 7day-incidence on Madeira island, which was affected by the omicron wave much earlier than the mainland, is now stagnating at around 1.400 for the last two weeks and did not fall any further. My personal opinion is that we may experience some sort of “catch-up effect”, as Madeira was hit less hard than mainland Portugal by the earlier Covid waves both a year ago and over the summer. Perhaps the mainland is taking the lead now, because a higher proportion of the population there has passed through a previous Covid infection, which leads to stronger average immunity there now.
The increase in corona-related deaths in Portugal now seems to have reached a maximum of around 3 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per week and will hopefully slowly fall again in the next few days. Again, we observe that the island of Madeira, the Algarve and the Azores have slightly higher mortality rates than the other Portuguese regions, which could be caused by the “catch-up effect” considered above, if it was not for a possibly different age structure of the regional population.
With the rising temperatures of coming spring, we can hope for the current omicron wave to diminish further in the coming weeks, but this will still require our continuous precaution (wearing masks, keeping social distance, and updating our vaccinations).