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On the first day of the new (and fourth) state of emergency, António Costa confessed to being “surprised” with the arrival of the second wave of the covid-19 pandemic, which he hoped would only face from autumn to winter (and not during autumn arrival). “Nobody expected it to arrive so soon,” he declared in an interview with Jornal das 8, on TVI. The government president said that the executive is preparing a specific support package for the restaurants that will be affected by the restriction measures for the next two weekends and that a vaccination plan for citizens is already being developed. 19.
The prime minister acknowledged that the country now faces “a much more serious situation” than that of the “beginning of the first state of emergency”, but stressed that, even so, the country still has the capacity to control the numbers of the pandemic. By admitting that events such as weddings and baptisms (allowed throughout the summer) contributed to the broadcasts that occurred in the family context and that were responsible for 68% of the new cases, the prime minister ruled out that it was the responsibility of the government: the people As a whole, it did not react as easily as in the past ”.
Vaccination “can’t be saved if you can”
In reaction to the preliminary results of the large-scale tests of the covid-19 vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German partner BioNTech, which were known this Monday and that demonstrate that the experimental vaccine is 90% effective, António Costa explained that all the countries of the European Union (which, like Portugal, are included in the list of the vaccine acquisition mechanism) will have to present their vaccination strategy this month, which is already being prepared by the Government, together with the Directorate – General of Health At the same time, “a logistics operation to receive and store” vaccines is being installed. “You can’t save yourself if you can. It will have to be very well organized, especially since the storage requirements are very complex and vary from one vaccine to another, ”he said. “It can only turn out well, we cannot fail at that,” he stressed.
Restaurants will have more support
The prime minister acknowledged that the restaurant has been greatly affected and announced that, therefore, there will be “a specific package of support for catering companies, so that they suffer income losses in the next two weekends.” The calculation will be made based on the invoicing of the previous year (or the previous weekend). The measure is still being designed and will be adapted to each restaurant, as there are restaurants that sell more on the weekend and others have more during the week, exemplified the Prime Minister. “We have to estimate what are the fixed costs that these companies have and those that they already bear leave”He said, without giving details of the compensation that will be prepared.
“We will speak with representatives of the sector throughout the week,” he said. Commerce and hotels should not expect specific support. “The shirt that I don’t buy today, I can buy it tomorrow. I can stay in a hotel that I don’t do today on another weekend. There is one thing I don’t do: dinner today I don’t make tomorrow, “he said.
Regarding recourse to the social and private health sector, now provided for in the state of emergency, António Costa said little, highlighting only that the appeal has already been made in relation to the tests and noting that, in the National Health Service, there are still 704 beds. available for intensive care [para tratamento de covid-19] Without disturbing the rest of the activity, it can go up to 944 beds (disturbing the rest of the activity).
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we were the country with the fewest intensive care beds per 100,000 inhabitants,” he said. “We set ourselves the goal of reaching the European Union (EU) average in one year. We already have another 50, we will have another 50 by the end of the year and the remaining 100 in the first quarter of 2021, “he said. Still, there is no guarantee that it will be enough. “If we manage to control the situation, as we have at this time in which there is still capacity for half of the beds in the Intensive Care Units assigned to covid-19, we will be able to live without disruptive dramas,” he promised. “So far the NHS has not failed at all,” he said.
“PSD took a step of the greatest gravity”
The Prime Minister also spoke of the outcome of the elections in the Azores, where the PSD and Chega reached an agreement to make a solution to the right possible, after the PS lost the absolute majority. He remarked that what he considers very worrying “is not that there is a parliamentary majority that has better conditions to govern than the PS that won the elections,” but rather – and here he stressed that he spoke as secretary general of the PS and not as prime minister – that the PSD has taken “a step that the democratic right in Europe has not taken, which is to reach an agreement with a xenophobic party on the extreme right.”
For Costa, “this is a step of the greatest gravity” and is “in total contradiction” with what Rui Rio said recently. The PS leader recalled that Rui Rio had said that there would only be an agreement “if Chega changes substantially – and less a week later, he made a deal without Chega having changed anything ”.
“The problem is not the terms of the agreement, but the nature of Chega.” “It is no coincidence that in Europe there is a sanitary cordon to the xenophobic parties of the extreme right, which threaten the dignity of the human person. Here there can be no compromise. Whoever commits shows lightness about essential values ”, he evaluated. He concluded: “I will never negotiate with Chega.”
