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In a communication to the country, after Parliament approved the renewal of the state of emergency until March 1, Prime Minister António Costa, at the end of the Council of Ministers meeting, announced that the “current level of confinement will be maintained. “for the next two weeks and that the population assumes this reality as the most likely scenario for the month of March.
António Costa spoke in three messages. The first to affirm that “thanks to the civic effort of the Portuguese, the confinement that we have had in progress is giving results”.
“In the last two weeks, we have not only slowed the growth of new cases, but we have steadily decreased the growth rate of new cases with a clearly increasing trend in the last two weeks,” he said, also revealing that the decrease in Los new cases have also been translated “into a significant reduction in the risk of transmissibility, the famous R, which currently stands at 0.77, which is the lowest the country has had since the start of the pandemic.”
The second message was to put his feet on the ground, and the Prime Minister noted that despite the improvement in the numbers, the “situation remains extremely serious.”
“As you will recall, we have differentiated, according to the table of the European Center for Disease Control, the level of risk according to the number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants in 14 days. And above 960 it is considered extremely serious. on a downward trend, but we are still at the level of more than 960 cases per 100 inhabitants in the last 14 days. This seriousness of the situation of new cases also translates into a very high number of people who remain hospitalized. They are less than 15 days, but still with a very high number with an enormous effort to demand from all health professionals in our country ”, he explained.
For the government leader, the “very high number of patients hospitalized in Intensive Care Units” and the “very high number of daily deaths” are “absolutely unacceptable.”
“If we compare them with the maximum number of deaths that we had in the first wave when we all mobilized to fight the pandemic, with those numbers that we continue to have today, we realize how absolutely unacceptable these values are,” he said. .
Finally, António Costa said what was not expected to be new to anyone: “We have to maintain the current level of confinement. Surely, for the next 15 days and we must realistically assume that we will have to keep it quiet during the month of March. . It is not time to start discussing discrepancies, total or partial, it is time for us to continue with all determination doing what we have been doing in recent weeks because only in this way can we bring the entire country to a level of security that gives us comfort in the entire handling of a pandemic. “
