Return to state of emergency lockdown not on the table – António Costa
The country's prime minister said that the return to a state of emergency is not on the table for now.
The prime minister said that the country’s return to a state of emergency is not on the table, stressing that this is a constitutional competence of the President of the Republic and that the previous lockdown had “huge costs”.
This position was conveyed by António Costa in an interview with TVI on Monday night, after he questioned a possible return of Portugal to a state of emergency in view of the constant increase in the number of coronavirus cases in recent weeks.
“It is not a scenario that is on the table at the moment”, replied the leader of the executive, after being asked if he had discussed this matter with the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
At this point, António Costa stressed that the scenario adopted by the Government was to raise the state of alert to the level of calamity.
“At this moment, this is the appropriate level, but everything depends on a number of factors. It is true that we will have a greater number of new cases per day than in the worst phase of the pandemic last April. But fortunately, now, with fewer hospitalizations than there were then and, above all, with fewer intensive care patients, which is very much due to the fact that there has been a significant change in the age group affected,” the prime minister argued.
António Costa also argued that, currently, the National Health Service (SNS) “is better prepared than it was at the start of this pandemic.”
“We have an intensive care bed occupancy rate for Covid-19 of 66%. Fortunately, we are far from having the SNS under pressure,” he said.
Asked about the possibility of the government adopting a curfew measure at night, as is already the case in several European countries, he replied that he could not rule out any measure.
“But I must say that the cost of these measures is immense,” he said, before pointing out that last spring’s confinement had generated almost 100,000 unemployed in the country.
At this stage of the interview, without being questioned about his institutional relations with the President of the Republic, António Costa even took the opportunity to praise the action of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
“If there is one thing that has gone very well in the last five years it is the excellent collaboration between the Government and the President of the Republic, both with the present and the previous one,” he added.
