The so-called “covid parties”, organized by young people, continue to be a concern for the authorities. The President of the Council of Portuguese Medical Schools warns of the consequences of this disease, also in the youngest and stresses the need to adopt defensive behaviours.
There is still a lot to know about the new coronavirus, so there are few precautions: social distance, wearing a mask and hand hygiene are essential to prevent contagion. Simple gestures, which, however, are not being carried out by many young people who these days gather at parties, which “is completely wrong and irresponsible”, says Professor Fausto Pinto to Renascença news.
The director of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon explains that these parties bring “consequences, not only for the people involved, but also for family members and other people with whom they come in contact, in addition to starting new epidemiological chains”.
Group immunity is only possible with a vaccine
This expert says that the argument for seeking group immunity, used by many young people to promote parties, is meaningless.
“It is clear today that it is not possible to have, naturally, group immunity through the infection of people.” According to Fausto Pinto, this “can only be reached if there is a vaccine”.
The fact that you are young, have no risk factors, and develop the disease even if only slightly, the infected person can maintain the symptoms for five or six weeks. The lack of knowledge is still so much as “it is not known why there are people who develop the most severe forms of the disease and others do not”.
The specialist warns of the consequences: tiredness and breathing problems. “In terms of recovery, there were people who lost a lot of weight and lost their muscle capacity.”
“It is a disease that is not to be caught”
It is “necessary to adopt very defensive behaviours in relation to the virus” about which there is still much to know. For Fausto Pinto “this is a disease that is not to be caught, this is not a disease that we want to be infected to solve the problem and be immunized”.
For this reason, he highlights the “a little careless way in which some types of demonstrations were authorized, shows with thousands of people, this gives the population an image of some lightness, of an exaggerated optimism”.