Lisbon, Europe Brief News – COVID-19 cases and deaths are climbing in Portugal’s popular tourist hotspots like Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve region.
Portugal’s latest outbreak has made the country a hotspot of COVID-19 in Europe and home to the second-highest coronavirus case count in the world, after Taiwan.
After pandemic curbs were lifted earlier this year, a spate of COVID-19 cases and deaths are growing in popular tourist population centres like Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve region as two years of pandemic-related cancellations have given way to popular parties and festivals during the summer season.
The nation registered an average of 1,989 new cases per million people over the past seven days. In comparison, Spain registered 232 and the UK 161, according to tracker Our World in Data.
Portugal also registered an average of 41 deaths per one million inhabitants over a seven-day period, making the country home to the fifth-highest mortality rate in the world.
Many health officials have expressed a mixture of light concern and disappointment at Portugal’s uptick in infections.
“The hope was that during the summer, we would have no more waves, no more coronavirus increases, so the hopes are somewhat diminished,” Hajo Zeeb, professor of epidemiology at the University of Bremen in Germany, who is closely monitoring Portugal’s current COVID-19 situation, told Al Jazeera.
