Football, health and the country’s future

The chart is a verb that appears not to be used in Portugal. If the pandemic could be prevented, as experts assigned by the World Health Organization (WHO) warned this week, imagine what could have been taken care of the night Sporting was crowned champion. According to the experts who make up the independent committee formed at the invitation of the World Health Organization, there is an urgent need for widespread reforms of warning and prevention systems to prevent new epidemics.

The same group believes that the WHO took too long to issue the warning and that the catastrophe classified as “Chernobyl of the 21st century” could have been avoided, which had already claimed the lives of at least 3.3 million people and caused the global economic crisis. The same report revealed, “It is clear that the combination of bad strategic options and a poorly coordinated system created a toxic mixture that allowed the epidemic to turn into a catastrophic human crisis.” It is a ferocious attack on the health officials of the world.

Experts confirm: A very long time has elapsed between the reporting of an outbreak of an epidemic in China, in the second half of December 2019, and the declaration of the World Health Organization, on January 30, of an international public health emergency. The expert group recommends the launch of a new global monitoring system based on “full transparency”. “We suggest that the World Health Organization start publishing all the information it has in real time without the permission of governments,” said Michael Kazachkin, a member of the independent committee.

If all this could have been avoided, then it is not understood how the Sporting fans could not have been prevented from focusing around the Alvalade stadium and the Marques de Pombal roundabout. Understandably the joy and the festivities after 19 years of waiting for this moment, but someone failed the whole process and that was made clear by the TV pictures that all the Portuguese have seen. Safety and health were at stake. We’ll see the results for this group of fans in a week or two.

The club’s supporters, the police and the Interior Ministry did not do well. The pre-release of this fan focus was taking place on social networks and other forums and nothing was done except, as a last resort, to get your hands on rubber bullets. Lack of planning, lack of prevention and unpredictability is a persistent problem in Portugal and threatens the future.