Two patients hospitalized for several days at Hospital de Santa Maria, in Lisbon, are infected with the new coronavirus, after having been wrongly diagnosed with pneumonia unrelated to Covid-19. Inpatients who have been in the same units as these two patients have already been tested and are not infected. In addition, a team was created specifically to monitor patients who were discharged from the wards where the two positive cases were.
The discovery, however, forced the hospital to suspend hospitalizations in three wards, to look for other possible infected people and to take preventive measures, such as interrupting the transfer of patients.
According to a circular sent this Wednesday to the employees of the Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Norte – which includes the hospitals of Santa Maria and Pulido Valente -, to which the Observer had access, one of the patients in question was admitted to infirmary 1-B of the emergency service. Internal Medicine and the other was in 2-B, having also passed through infirmary 2-C. It does not, however, specify how long they have been there. As the Observer found, one has been hospitalized for a week and the other since last weekend.
These positive cases were “immediately” transferred to the Respiratory Isolation Unit, the document says, but it remains to be seen how many patients and health professionals they contacted until the infection was confirmed.
It was one change in definition of suspected case of the new coronavirus that tested these two patients, who had a diagnosis of pneumonia. With this change, which occurred on March 9 by the Directorate-General for Health (DGS), a patient with a severe respiratory infection, which requires hospitalization and whose origin is not identified – in addition to those who have been in one of the risk areas or who have had contact with suspected or confirmed cases, read one of the latest guidelines of the DGS.
But even when some suspicions arose in relation to these patients, it took some time before authorization to carry out diagnostic tests to arrive at confirmation of infection, a source told the Observer.
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