Last year, on 19 October, the line received 3,483 calls, which means there was an increase of almost 20,000 calls this year at the same time. The other two biggest peaks were on 15 and 16 October 2020, according to data from the Health Ministry.

Although, until now, March and September are the record months for calls, with numbers above 381,000 and 306,000, the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health expected that “October will be the month with the highest volume of answered calls”. Before the pandemic, says the organisation, “the month with the highest number of answered calls was January 2019, registering just over 200,000 calls”.

According to the “Balance of Activity of the SNS24 Line 2017 - 2020”, 864,939 calls were answered in 2017, a number that rose to 1,200,171 the following year and 1,485,808 in 2019. This year, in the context of a pandemic, 1.5 million calls were answered in the first seven months - higher than the total for 2019.