There were some passengers who were blocked [sábado] The Minister of Tourism of Madeira, Eduardo Jesus, told Lusa that inappropriately embarking on Madeira has caused a lot of inconvenience to these people.”
The government official considered that “this situation that occurred on Saturday at Lisbon airport is unreasonable.”
According to today’s release from Jornal da Madeira, the PSP prevented 10 passengers who intended to fly to Madeira from boarding a TAP flight departing from Lisbon Airport for not having a negative PCR test for covid-19 virus.
At the origin of this case are the rules established by the Government of the Republic for the metropolitan area of Lisbon, on weekends, due to the increase in cases of coronavirus.
The Cabinet decision stipulated that one could leave the metropolitan area only by submitting a negative test for the novel coronavirus or a digital certificate.
The official in charge of tourism in the Executive Directorate of Maderan highlighted that “when passengers intend to travel between Lisbon and this autonomous region, they are naturally not subject to the rules that have been imposed” in that part of the national territory.
Because of this, he stressed that enforcement of the measure “has absolutely no place” with regard to those intending to travel to Madeira.
“We are talking about moving to an autonomous region that has its own system of epidemic control and tracing,” he said.
Eduardo Jesus said that everything Madeira does is “pretty well known” in terms of access control in the area, with “units installed at Madeira and Porto Santo airports where no one without a PCR test done in the last few years enters 72 hours or undergoes PCR testing.” Upon arrival “.
The ousted governor stressed that “the orientation given at the national level does not apply to Madeira.”
Eduardo Jesus stated that “when the regional government became aware of this circumstance, it immediately took steps to clarify, inform the airlines and, at the same time, make clear that this impediment was wrong and offensive.”
For Eduardo Jesus, “It is now important to restore normalcy, and not to repeat this incident.”
The government official in Madeira stressed that this kind of situation involves “harm to the mobility” of the passengers, considering that the affected group “which was prevented from traveling to Madeira, must ensure a solution that would make these people reach the area as quickly as possible.” possible. And in the most convenient way.”
Lusa has contacted PSP for further clarification, but so far without success.
On Saturday, the Regional Directorate of Health reported that six new cases of COVID-19 were diagnosed, recording 78 active cases in the region.
The DRS indicated in the daily epidemiological bulletin that the Funchal Hospital still has no patients admitted to the units designated for this disease.
The COVID-19 pandemic has killed at least 3,974,841 people worldwide, resulting from more than 183.4 million cases of the novel coronavirus, according to the latest AFP tally.
In Portugal, since the beginning of the epidemic, in March 2020, 17,112 people died and 887,047 cases of infection were recorded, according to the Directorate General of Health.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which was discovered in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in countries such as the United Kingdom, India or South Africa.
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