Portuguese Embassy in Cape Verde suspends consular assistance after suspected cases – News from Coimbra
Service to the public for all services is temporarily suspended at the Consular Section of the Embassy of Portugal in Praia after suspected cases of covid-19 among employees, it was announced today.
“All users of the Consular Section of the Portuguese Embassy in Praia are informed that, with suspicion of positive cases of covid-19 among embassy employees and wishing to avoid a situation of contagion for the community, the service provided to the public is temporarily suspended while the procedures included in the screening of cases of infection are adopted”, an embassy announced in a press release.
The same source assured that the services of the Consular Section will be resumed soon, while all the appointments made (Portuguese matters and visa applications) will be rescheduled in due course.
Cape Verde has registered an increase in new positive cases of covid-19 in recent days, with peaks since September, with an emphasis on 148 on Saturday, currently having 523 active cases, a total of 39,072 positive cases accumulated since the beginning of the pandemic and 38,172, recovered cases and 351 deaths.
In terms of vaccination, the country has about 84% of adults with the first dose, has already surpassed 70 with full vaccination and began on December 16 to vaccinate children between 12 and 17 years old, already taken with a rate of around 45%.
Covid-19 has caused more than 5.39 million deaths worldwide since the start of the pandemic, according to the latest report by Agence France-Presse.
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 several countries.
A new variant, an Omicron, classified as concerned by the World Health Organization (WHO), has been detected in southern Africa, but since the South African health authorities raised the alert on 24 November, infections have been reported in at least 89 countries from all continents, including Portugal.