Portugal’s President hopes lockdown will not exceed one month

  • Lusa
  • 15 January 2021

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said that he hopes that the new general lockdown will not exceed one month.

Portugal’s President and re-election candidate, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, on Friday, said that he hopes that the current lockdown will not exceed one month.

“We hope it does not exceed a month, but we will see, we hope it does not,” Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa told reporters while campaigning as a candidate in the January 24 presidential elections in Lisbon.

“I hope it will only last a month. If we manage – it depends a lot on all of us – in these fifteen days, and then in the renewal at the end of the month, we come close to Carnival and if it works, if we bow down, we reverse the trend.”

“This allows us to close the problem or reduce it in its most critical phase, to an important part of the first quarter. What we want to do is to avoid this over to the second quarter, so it’s already half a year and it’s a problem,” he added.

He reiterated that he would like by the end of February to see a turnaround in the evolution of Covid-19 in Portugal, with a trend of falling cases.

“That is the ideal. To stop what worsened in the first quarter, not to let slip into the second quarter, giving time for vaccination to begin to create effects in terms of immunising people,” he said.