Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa considers it necessary to maintain the state of emergency to "allow the Government to continue to take the most appropriate measures to combat this phase of the pandemic" of Covid-19, but asks that "indispensable support measures to families and businesses, including default and non-repayable support" are improved.
The renewal of the state of emergency will be approved in the plenary meeting this afternoon, with the support of PS, PSD, CDS-PP and PAN. This is the 12th period of state of emergency that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has submitted for authorization from parliament during the current Covid-19 pandemic.
The current state of emergency period ends at 23:59 on Monday, March 1st. This renewal will take effect in the period between 2nd and 16th March.
The decreee is almost identical to that already in force, although in the chapter on restrictions on face-to-face education, it is reiterated that "a phased reopening plan should be defined based on objective criteria and respecting public health purposes".
In the last renewal, on February 11th, the Prime Minister, António Costa, defended that it will be necessary to maintain the current general confinement "even during the month of March" and that it was not the time "to start discussing total or partial deflections" .
When he spoke to the country that night, the head of state considered that the state of emergency and general confinement should continue "until the end of March", without "opening things up for Easter", in early April, to avoid a setback in containment of Covid-19 in Portugal.
Until Easter, he set goals to reduce the number of new daily cases of infection "to less than two thousand" and to lower the cases of hospitalization and in intensive care to" a quarter of their values", which were at the time were over 5000 and over 800, respectively.
Original article available in Portuguese at http://postal.pt/
