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Press Release
Extraordinary Meeting of the Council of Ministers of May 25, 2020
The Council of Ministers met at the Government Palace in Dili and decided to ask the President of the Republic to extend the State of Emergency which ends on May 27 for another thirty days. The need to extend the state of emergency is due to the worrying evolution of the epidemiological situation and the proliferation of recorded cases of COVID-19 contagion in the neighboring country, Indonesia, particularly in West Timor, which also require the maintenance of the application of some extraordinary measures, although mitigated, to stop the pandemic, avoiding the transmission of new cases of infection by the new coronavirus in national territory. The state of emergency was enacted on 27 March 2020 and was renewed on 27 April 2020 and the measures that have been possible since that decree have greatly contributed to the fact that there are currently no active cases of COVID-19 in national territory. The new Coronavirus, first reported in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, has affected more than 5.4 million people worldwide and caused the deaths of more than 300,000 people.
The Minister of Public Works, Salvador Soares dos Reis Pires and the Secretary of State for Civil Protection, Alexandrino de Araújo, presented to the Council of Ministers the state of affairs of the intervention to support those affected and to recover from the damage of floods, which occurred last week in several municipalities and caused damage to housing, public buildings, roads and bridges. ENDS