Top health official isolating after contact with infected person
In a statement, the Directorate-General of Health (DGS) said that the decision for Graça Freitas to isolate was in line with current guidelines.
Portugal’s top health official, Graça Freitas, the director-general of health, is self-isolating after having had a high-risk contact on Friday with a person infected with the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, but will continue working remotely, her office has announced.
In a statement, the Directorate-General of Health (DGS) said that the decision for her to isolate was in line with current guidelines.
She has already been infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and recovered, and was vaccinated more than 14 days ago, the statement recalls.
In Portugal, since the first cases of the virus were identified in March 2020, there have been 17,156 deaths associated with Covid-19 and 907,974 confirmed cases of infection with the virus, according to the DGS.
Worlwide, there have been at least 4,028,446 deaths, resulting from more than 186.3 million cases of infection, according to the most recent report by Agence France-Presse.
Covid-19 is a respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, first detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in countries including the UK, India, South Africa, Brazil and Peru.
