Pandemic - the second wave and its pitfalls

 We are now deep in the second wave of the covid-19 pandemic. Portugal is going through a "heck of a time", amidst very tough Sanitary (the Health System is already collapsing) and Economic (severe double-digit GDP loss, unemployment strong rise and collapse of important parts of the economy) situations. As a good friend of mine put it, this is the worst crisis we are going through since the Great Depression of the end of the 20s (at least, might even end up being more severe than that one, at least for Portugal).

Very shortly, point blankly, I would like to highlight the three biggest mistakes the Portuguese Government fell into:

- Not enough planning at the right time - though the lack of preparedness for the first wave is justifiable, what we are seeing nowadays is the result of bad / non existing planning from May onwards. Several basic measures should have been taken during the Summer and were not. Just to highlight a few: in November, an integrated process and tools to manage beds occupation across the SNS (/ NHS) was still not in place; more than a thousand hospital beds were still taken by discharged patients in early November (people were discharge but remained consuming hospital resources for lack of a place to go when discharged - happens a lot with elderly people); data collection and reporting seems to be fundamentally flawed, leading to bad decision making and hampering strategic direction efforts to control the pandemic.

- No easy to access financial supports to business - the measures that are announced every week fail due to inconsistency, bureaucratic procedures that hamper implementation and party politics (the decisions to nationalize TAP and eventually the mail company are incomprehensible funds vortexes). The tourism and restauration sector have collapsed (more than 10% of GDP) and no measures have been taken to support the individual businesses - the risk of a significant collapse of the economy is real, due to domino effect on unemployment, wages, baking system, tax returns,...

- Late and inconsistent measures - every week, new measures are announced with wide implications over society. This has three deep effects: - people are lost in what measures apply to them and feel overburdened with increasingly tough measures, leading to a significant "tiredness" and low moral effect; - it is impossible for businesses to plan ahead and adjust their businesses, as they don't know what measures they need to adapt to, leading to increasingly economic losses; and finally, the incoherence of measures prevents the enhancement of its positive effects, as they are constantly being interrupted (there is a positive ramp up / curve that is not taking place, especially in terms of disease propagation rates).