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Experts, politicians and social partners return this Monday to meet, now in Porto, to analyze the epidemiological situation of Covid-19 in Portugal, with the presentations in open broadcast for the first time.
This session – which marks the return of what were known as the “heart attack meetings” – according to a government source, “will be important” for agree on the measures to be taken from 15 this month, when the Portuguese continent, in a preventive way, enters a situation of contingency.
This time in the auditorium of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto, the Prime Minister, António Costa, the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, and the President of the Assembly of the Republic, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, returned to join the party leaders. and social partners to hear from technicians and experts on the situation of the pandemic in Portugal.
Another novelty of the 11th session is the broadcast via the Government YouTube channel and in an open signal on televisions, from the exhibition part of the meeting, something that never happened in previous meetings, all closed. Thus, in the first part of the meeting, the “current epidemiological situation” will be presented by Pedro Pinto Leite, from the General Health Directorate, and Baltazar Nunes, from the Dr. Ricardo Jorge National Institute of Health.
In the section on “updating information”, “the national serological survey” (Ana Paula Rodrigues, from the National Institute of Health Dr. Ricardo Jorge), “the case-control study” (Henrique Barros, Institute of Public Health of the Universidad do Porto), “APP Stayaway Covid” (José Manuel Mendonça, of the Institute of Engineering, Technology and Science of Systems and Computation), and Luís Goes Pinheiro, of the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health) and the “new vaccine” ( Rui Santos Ivo, from Infarmed).
In the second part there will be a presentation by Maria João Brito, from the Dona Estefânia Hospital (Lisbon), about “Covid-19 in children” and another on “A safe return to school: facing reality, minimizing risks, anticipating solutions”, with Carla Nunes, National School of Public Health, Manuel do Carmo Gomes, from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, and again scored by Henrique Barros. This is followed by the debate and the closing period, which will not be broadcast.
These meetings, which arose at the initiative of the Prime Minister, with the aim of sharing information, began on March 24 and lasted until July 8, in 10 sessions in the auditorium of Infarmed – National Authority of Medicines and Health Products, in Lisbon, initially weekly and then biweekly. After about two months without meetings, the Minister of State and the Presidency, Mariana Vieira da Silva, announced on August 27 that these sessions with experts and politicians would be resumed, with a novelty: “There will be a part, the exhibition part, that it will be broadcast openly and that is the main difference the encounters will have compared to the past.
Already after the criticism of the leader of PSD Rui Rio, at the end of the tenth meeting, on July 8, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa declared to the media: “Today we finished an experiment of several months, started at the end of March in a state of emergency. On the same day, the Prime Minister, however, denied the end of these meetings, and objected that only a date had not been set for the next session, which should only take place when two ongoing studies on Covid-19 in Portugal. “Whenever justified, there will be new meetings”, said.
At the end of the sessions, it was customary for the head of state to summarize the conclusions with the journalists, with the Prime Minister and the President of the Assembly of the Republic at his side. The representatives of the nine parties with parliamentary seats then spoke.
