Berta Nunes, who ended a five-day visit to Angola on Wednesday, said that the concern of reducing three weekly flights to one was raised during the dialogue with the Portuguese community in Luanda, having clarified that it is a reciprocity agreement.
"We had the opportunity to inform that we are aware of the situation, but having only one weekly flight is a question that has to do with reciprocity, TAAG has one weekly flight, TAP has one weekly flight, this is also an agreement between Governments, because they have to be authorized at Government level," said Berta Nunes.
The Portuguese leader stressed that she wants the connections to be more frequent, but it is necessary to take into account the pandemic.
"The concern is of the governments of both countries and it will have to be in a progressive way. Portugal is improving, vaccination is progressing, Angola has also started the vaccination process and we know that only with the advancement of this process there will also be the necessary security to resume normality", he stressed.
The Secretary of State for Communities reiterated that "it is not exactly a reduction of flights", but rather an agreement between the two governments, that at this moment only one flight per week (for each flag carrier) because of the health situation.
"There are concerns on both sides, in the case of the Angolan government they don't have many cases, but they also have to protect their health system, in the Portuguese case, the cases are also under control, hopefully we will be progressing in our deconfinement processes and monitoring the number of new cases and also hospitalizations, of patients in intensive care," he said.
The covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 3,046,134 deaths worldwide, resulting from more than 142.8 million cases of infection, according to an assessment by the French agency AFP.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
