Restaurants, bars in Madeira can stay open until 1 a.m. from Friday

Restaurants and other commercial establishments in Portugal’s Madeira region will be able to stay open until 1 a.m. from Friday, the president of the regional government said on Wednesday, stressing that the curfew will now be between 2 and 5 a.m.

“Next Thursday, we [the cabinet] will renew the situation of calamity in Madeira and we will only extend the hours of establishments, which will now close at 01:00 [with] curfew at 02:00,” said the regional president, Miguel Albuquerque.

Currently, commercial establishments must close at midnight throughout the autonomous region and the curfew takes effect at 1 a.m.

Albuquerque, who leads a right-of-centre PSD/CDS-PP coalition, was speaking on the sidelines of a visit to the headquarters of the Santana City Solidarity Association, in Santana, in the north of the island of Madeira, where €202,000 in improvement and rehabilitation works have been carried out, under the aegis of the regional government.

“We will maintain a set of requirements – the use of masks, social distancing – because they are going well, there is no point in changing them, and we will make a great effort to vaccinate what remains of the young population,” the premier stressed.

Albuquerque said that the executive intended to enact “more effective measures” in terms of restrictions from October, but for now is focused on ensuring the vaccination of the region’s population, with the target of 85% coverage by the end of September.

Madeira on Monday reached the mark of 70% of residents (175,000) fully inoculated against Covid-19, but the regional authorities intend to inoculate 85% of the region’s 251,000 inhabitants, in a bid to achieve herd immunity.

“It’s going to be a very big effort,” said Albuquerque. “We’re going to do it and, from that moment on, we have guarantees that we can extend some of the prevention measures that are in place.”

He also announced “mass testing” of teachers, students and school staff in order to start the new school year “in complete safety”.

According to the latest data from the Regional Health Directorate, the archipelago of Madeira currently has 364 active cases of infection with the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, with a cumulative 11,074 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic and a total of 75 deaths associated with the disease.

Worldwide, Covid-19 has caused at least 4,439,888 deaths, out of more than 212.4 million infections recorded since the start of the pandemic, according to the latest balance sheet from Agence France-Presse.

In Portugal, 17,658 people have died and 1,022,807 confirmed cases of infection have been counted, according to data from the Directorate-General of Health.

The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in countries such as the UK, India, South Africa, Brazil and Peru.