A survey applied to more than a hundred entities shows that the lack of resources and unclear communication addressed to citizens made it difficult to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic in the Portuguese-speaking world.
This survey was carried out as part of a study led by André Dias Pereira, a researcher at the Legal Institute and professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Coimbra (DDF), and funded by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Entitled “Responsibility for Public Health in the Lusophone world: doing justice in and beyond the COVID emergency”, the study focused on the collection and analysis of data related to the preparedness and response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Angola, Brazil, Mozambique, Portugal and the Macau Special Administrative Region, with the objective of “proposing public health policy solutions, allowing the construction of response systems ethically adequate to the difficulties presented in pandemic situations”, explains André Dias Pereira.
This project, he stresses, «combines a thorough analysis of the most recent legislation and bibliography on the subject, with data obtained through a questionnaire, addressed to a significant number of participants, in order to gather different experiences and analyze the ethical difficulties identified in the response to the pandemic, which are problems that will pursue and condition the political options of the coming years and whose repercussions are yet to be assessed; without forgetting to mention the catastrophic economic impact of the pandemic, which cuts across all states».
Respondents in the scope of the study also defend “that investment in prevention, in addition to being very effective in mitigating the pandemic, is also one of the vectors in which there should be more concentration of resource allocation”.
This project will result in a white paper, addressed to the Portuguese-speaking communities and government agencies of the countries and special administrative region involved, where proposals and recommendations are presented that can be implemented in practice to enhance health systems, preparing them to respond to situations public health emergency.
All the results obtained by the team of André Dias Pereira, which includes academics, lawyers and lawyers, as well as specialists in Bioethics, will be presented at the final conference of the project, which will take place on March 25, from 9 am to 5:30 pm, in online format.
In this conference, which brings together participants from Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and Macau, the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Portuguese-speaking world will also be analyzed, such as, for example, the problem of non-Covid patients, especially patients oncological; Macau’s experience against Covid-19; the performance of the Brazilian National Congress in face of the pandemic; and the influence of Covid-19 on the functioning of university institutions in Angola.
