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Focusing on Avenida dos Aliados, at 8:30 am, some thirty people, restaurant owners and employees, but many chose to take a walk, honking the horn.
The protesters say that the new measures announced by the government are “extremely emasculating” for the restaurant sector that “will lead to the closure of many” establishments.
“I understand the government’s measures less than what forces us to close and prohibits people from moving from 1:00 pm on weekends,” Samuel Santos, owner of two restaurants, one in Matosinhos, told Lusa. another in Gondomar. , in the district of Porto.
With 32 employees, Samuel Santos admitted that “there are two weekends left”, but fears that the measure will be prolonged and endanger the future of “32 families.”
This businessman defends that the confinement must exist, but “at the same hours” when it occurs during the week, because “weekends represent around 70% of the turnover”.
The protesters “served” bread and water at a table set up on Avenida dos Aliados, where they placed plates and cutlery as an “image of the situation” in which they find themselves.
Organized “spontaneously” on social media, the protest aims to challenge and “try to reverse” the new restriction measures announced for the sector, that is, the curfew from 1:00 p.m. on the next two ends a week in the 121 most affected municipalities. by covid-19, which adds to the already decided closure of restaurants at 10:30 p.m.
Speaking to Lusa, Álvaro Costa, owner of a restaurant and hotel consulting company, was “in solidarity” with his clients, who “only want to work, without obviously neglecting what is essential, that is, avoiding the increase in the pandemic” .
He highlighted that “60 to 70% of catering companies have half of their weekly turnover based on meals on Saturday night and lunch on Sunday.”
Pedro Maia, one of the protest activists, explained that businessmen want to “make it clear” that, “contrary to the image that the Government is showing, restaurants are not the center of contagion”, demanding to know “the statistics in the that the government is based to promulgate the announced measures ”.
“The sector is tense,” he said, stating that “everyone knows that contagion occurs in the family environment” and that “the promoter of this situation is the schools.”
Referring, by way of example, to a news item published recently, Pedro Maia recalled that “the highest number of infected is the group between 10 and 19 years old.”
“The message that is transmitted is very serious for small businesses, restaurants and bars, which are almost victims of persecution. More people pass through a supermarket box in one day than in a month in my restaurant, which has 20 seats, “added the businessman.
He also criticized the “lack of support measures for the sector.”
“We want the Minister of Economy to tell us how we are going to do it. We want to be clear about what support we have to close and how we are going to pay salaries and rents, ”he said.
The Government announced the curfew between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. from Monday to Friday, from Monday to November 23, in the 121 municipalities most affected by the pandemic, with the mandatory curfew beginning at 1:00 p.m. in the same 121 counties.
“We have a clear notion that social interaction has a very important contribution to the spread” of contagion and that the spread develops in the post-work period, said António Costa, who spoke after midnight, Saturday, at the end of the working day. meeting of the extraordinary Council of Ministers, at the Ajuda Palace, in Lisbon, to implement the measures of the state of emergency that will come into effect between Monday, November 9 and 23.
The measure was announced on the day that Portugal reached a new daily maximum number of covid-19 cases by counting more than 6,640 infections in the last 24 hours, and registered 56 deaths in the same period, according to the General Directorate of Health.
