The Algarve could have many fewer municipalities in the list of municipalities with higher risk of contagion by Covid, if the population that actually resides in the region and not just the registered population were counted, defended today António Pina, president of AMAL – Intermunicipal Community of Algarve.
For the also president of the District Civil Protection Commission, the Algarve is being «once more harmed» by the fact that resident foreigners are not counted, but who have never registered as such, as well as longer-term visitors, namely motorhome drivers who choose the region to settle temporarily.
“This leads us to believe that if this population were considered, as we propose, many of the municipalities that appear in this list today would not be”, he believes.
Is that, mainly in Vila do Bispo, but also in Portimão and Albufeira, a large percentage of new cases diagnosed in recent weeks were from unregistered foreigners.
For António Pina, the inclusion of the eight Algarve councils in the list “reveals something we have been saying for a long time: the Algarve cannot be seen only by the resident population, but also by the floating population”.
“There are many more people living here, who are not in the statistics and are not registered, something that will not happen anywhere else, in the country, with this dimension. We must be counted as having at least 600 thousand inhabitants”, instead of the approximately 450 thousand officers, defended the official, at the biweekly press conference to assess the epidemiological situation in the Algarve.
This has already meant that "the Algarve has left Objective 1 [Convergence] of the European Union [where the poorest regions are]", something that the AMAL president considers would not have happened if there had been more inhabitants in the Algarve.
«We are going to present a proposal to the Government and the DGS to introduce a new criterion, to introduce another number in the weighting of cases in the Algarve. Foreigners cannot only count for cases, they must also be counted as population», announced António Pina.
Ana Cristina Guerreiro, the Algarve regional health delegate, defended, for her part, that the Algarve could be seen as a whole, for the purposes of counting the number of cases per 100 inhabitants.
«We have a population equivalent to the ACES [Group of Health Centers] Amadora-Sintra and we could even be looked at in that way, as a whole, without dividing by councils», considered Ana Cristina Guerreiro.
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