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With the return of thousands of students to schools, the Government announced that group gatherings of more than four people would be prohibited in all restaurants, cafes and pastry shops within a 300-meter radius of schools. In other restaurants (except shopping centers), the maximum limit is ten people per group. According to the crossing of data made by the PUBLIC, there will be at least 21 thousand commercial establishments affected by this measure.
In the center of cities such as Aveiro, Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra, Braga or Faro, where there is a high density of schools, there are many cafes and restaurants that feel “touched” by the proximity of schools, even when students are not there. its main clients. School locations are part of the school network database provided by the Institute for Financial Education Management (IGeFE) and may, in some cases, not match the exact location of the school grounds; the PUBLIC corrected some of these incorrect locations.
This measure to reduce the contagion of covid-19 (inserted in the state of contingency that came into force this Tuesday in mainland Portugal) is applied to all establishments of basic, secondary and higher education institutions, explained the Ministry of Education. Economy to the PUBLIC. The four person limit is not valid if the people are part of the same household.
And how do you know which businesses are affected? It is those responsible for the establishments themselves who must ensure that their businesses are, or not, “covered by this measure, depending on the distance between the establishment and the educational establishments in question,” explains the Ministry of Economy. and digital transition. The Government does not clarify from what point the schools have 300 meters.
In Aveiro, Cafe Monlou is less than 100 meters from José Estevão Secondary School and is one of the establishments that will have to restrict the number of people per group. “We will have to move, if groups of more than four come, they will be at separate tables”, simplifies the owner of the space, Sérgio Monteiro, who receives “many” student clients every day. “I don’t think it affects the business, we have to adapt. We have already been alerting people and feedback it was positive, ”he says. Still, he says he has felt the effects of the pandemic and, lately, the way the number of new cases has generated “fear” in people.
The Migas de Pão restaurant has no student clients despite being a few meters from the João de Meira School Group, in Guimarães. Since it has a counter instead of tables, this new rule will not cause major problems because groups of four are rarely received and there was already a social distance between those who sit there. But the effects of the pandemic have been observed: “We eat very few meals without a prescription. People avoid going to lunch ”, explains the owner, Gabriel Martins, to the PUBLIC. The solution has been the service of to carry out. PUBLIC contacted several restaurants 300 meters from schools whose main customers are not students to find out if the measures would harm them and if they were aware of the rule, but many were reluctant to speak.
The inspection will be carried out “by the same entities that inspect the other regulations applicable to the state of emergency defined in the resolution of the Council of Ministers, that is, the security forces and services and the municipal police.” On Friday, the Minister of Internal Administration, Eduardo Cabrita, said that the security forces have “very precise guidelines” to intervene in cases of concentrations of people and close any commercial establishment when the rules of containment of covid-19 are violated. The reopening of the academic year is one of the priority events.
For Prime Minister António Costa, meetings in the vicinity of schools should be “avoided at all costs” to reduce infections. “The appeal I make to everyone is that they know that the risk of contagion outside of school is no less than at school. If you have to be very careful at school to maintain physical distance, these rules must be followed outside educational establishments, “explained the prime minister at the end of the Council of Ministers on Thursday. The objective is that “the academic year can pass, as far as possible, only with teaching in the classroom.”
Methodological note:
PUBLIC began by compiling the location of all schools and higher education establishments. School locations were compiled on the page dedicated to the IGeFE school network. The schools that are not affected by this measure have been eliminated. As the IGeFE database did not have 74 schools located, PÚBLICO proceeded to collect the geographic coordinates of these educational establishments manually through Google Maps. When the PUBLIC team detected a poorly located school, they corrected it using the same method. In the case of higher education establishments, the PUBLIC used the database provided by the General Directorate of Educational and Scientific Statistics and collected the location of the institutions indicated in this database on the website of the General Directorate of Education Higher. Thus, it was possible to identify 5,597 schools and higher education establishments.
After collecting these locations, the PUBLIC used Google Cloud services to identify establishments identified on Google Maps within a radius of 300 meters that were classified as “Cafes” or “Restaurants”. As the service returned, in some cases, data from other types of establishments or even establishments that were within a radius of more than 300 meters from a certain educational establishment, PUBLIC proceeded to subsequently filter some cases. Although a service can be classified in several categories (for example, a pastry shop can be, at the same time, a bakery and a cafeteria for Google), the PUBLIC does not collect the establishments classified only as “Bakeries” or “Bars” or food to carry out.
