Wearing masks in open spaces is on the cards

The Minister of Health in Portugal, Marta Temido, today confirmed that there are plans in place to recommend the use of a mask in open spaces this autumn-winter,  given the impossibility of maintaining the physical distance rules to help prevention of Covid-19.

“’The legislation currently in force provides for mandatory use for people over 10 years of age in closed public spaces, recommending its use in any open or closed space, whenever the minimum physical distance of two meters is not guaranteed ‘. Therefore, this is already clearly the direction of the Directorate-General for Health that the ministry strives to enforce”, said the minister at the recent press conference on the evolution of the pandemic.

The explanation came in the wake of today’s statements by the President of the Republic, in which Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa left the suggestion of using a mask in “circulation on public roads at points of greatest concentration of people”, adding he had already adopted this behaviour “months ago”.

As for the number of outbreaks in schools, the Minister of Health distanced herself from the reading presented this Friday by the National Federation of Teachers (Fenprof), who put forward a list of 122 schools where cases have already been registered and questioned the DGS data that pointed to only 23 outbreaks.

“We are talking about different things and we cannot confuse the numbers, saying that someone gave wrong numbers when we refer to different concepts and even different dates,” said Marta Temido, seconded by the director-general of health: “One thing is isolated cases, another thing is outbreaks, which, as of today, are 28 in the country, with 175 confirmed cases. It does not mean that there are no other isolated cases”.

Portugal today registered 12 more deaths related to Covid-19 and 1,394 new cases of infection with the new coronavirus, according to the epidemiological bulletin of the Directorate-General for Health (DGS).

Since the beginning of the pandemic in March, this is the second highest number of cases of infection. The highest was on April 10, with 1,516.

Portugal has already registered 2,062 deaths and 83,928 cases of infection, with 29,700 cases being active today, 735 more than on Thursday.

Original article available in Portuguese at http://postal.pt/